Inside
by Javanyet
Summary: Ham Tyler's "computer geek" lover gets some hard lessons in the meaning of deep cover.
1. New plans

_Running, she was running, and when she finally, finally got to the door she didn't have her key. So she pounded and pounded on the door, hoping there'd be someone to let her in even though she lived on her own. On her own, she wanted to be on her own, and she lived as if she were on her own, while the others bound together and ran into the valley of death like in the poem she'd read. Someone was coming, she had to get in, she pounded and pounded and nobody came…_

"Easy," a voice came from nowhere but still nobody answered the door and someone was coming. She tried to pound louder but somebody was holding her fists, and nobody was opening the door.

"Please, _please_," she begged. The hands that held her fists moved to her face, holding it firmly and making her listen.

"You're okay, Angie," and the hands smoothed her hair back and lifted her (lifted? from where?).

Dragged into the waking world, she still couldn't leave the other behind. "No, no it's _not_," and she erupted into terrified gasping, "it's not, it's not, they're coming for me…"

"Nobody's coming, you're okay." Finally she was drawn into someone's protection, solid arms and hands and heartbeat, and she let herself be pulled all the way into the real world as fingertips lightly traced along her face. Still and steady, someone had held her like that before...

"_Tyler_" Angie wailed suddenly as if she'd been dropped abruptly out of another world into the dark.

"I'm right here," he assured her in a calm voice.

"Someone's coming," she panted, "I gotta get _in_."

"Relax, you just had a dream." Thinking for a minute about what she was wrestling with, he changed his approach. "I won't let 'em get you." That seemed to help. Tyler managed to sit them both up. She'd put up quite a fight, and the struggle in that damn miniature bed had almost knocked them both to the floor.

_I won't let 'em get you_. She trusted that voice, but needed more. "Promise me, _promise_…"

"I promise, nobody will get you."

Tyler saw was she was focused on his face at last and knew where she was, and who was with her, but she still looked terrified.

"_I won't let anybody get you_," he repeated firmly. He held her steady, her forehead almost touching his, so she had to look him straight in the eye.

As her panic subsided he lay down again still hugging her closely. Hell, there was no other way for them _to_ lie in that stupid little bed anyway, though generally speaking he didn't mind all that much.

_God, now he'll really think I'm psycho. _She was embarrassed and uneasy; it was the first time anyone had witnessed her secret fears in full flight. Well, maybe not the first, but the first time anyone had paid attention. David had never noticed, or at least hadn't _acted_ like he had even during the last most threatening days.

("_Davy, I'm worried. What if they come for us in IT? You know how they 'question' people._

"_It'll be fine. Nobody's being taken that didn't break the law."_

_It sounded a little strange to her. David never tried to comfort her, he only said that things would be "fine", as if he knew. But how could he? The laws kept changing so __fast_.)

When she'd caught her breath Angie asked, more than a little sheepishly, "So am I crazy enough to send you tearing off into the night?" She was absurdly relieved when Ham tightened his embrace.

"Not a chance." Sensing her awkwardness he smiled against her cheek and added, "Besides, Gooder's on watch… if he saw me running bare-assed out of your room I'd _definitely_ have to kill him." He knew she wouldn't laugh, but felt her relax just a bit. _God bless wiseass_, he thought, and waited until her breathing settled down before he loosened his grip. He didn't ask her to tell him about it.

"Thanks," she whispered shakily against his shoulder, "for not asking." Too much to explain, too many things she didn't understand herself.

"I know all I need to, Angel." He turned onto his side, cradling her against him. "Go back to sleep."

Angie lifted her head to look Tyler in the face, to make absolutely sure he knew she was being serious.

"Really, don't leave, okay? I mean, not without telling me." The few nights they'd spent together since the trip to the cabin he'd risen before sunrise and left without waking her. She didn't want that this time; the dream had left her too shaky.

"Not a chance."

* * *

"Anything new to report?" Julie asked.

All existing plans and projects had been discussed. The infiltration of the new food processing plant had been successful; the newly reconfigured pass creation system had worked to everyone's relief. Unlike the invasion of the medical center press event that had been designed to reveal the true nature of the Visitors, the latest operation had allowed a different set of rebels to enter and engage in subtle reconnaissance, assisted by some members of the 5th column headed by Donovan's contact Martin. They were gathering information to determine the general design of the processing centers, to identify common weaknesses so other resistance cells could be informed and multiple attacks could be coordinated. Otherwise processing would simply shift to the next nearest center until repairs were made.

"There's a new development in the general infiltration plan," Caleb announced. "Angie and Maggie have come up with something."

"You all know I have solid connection with a member of the Visitor Youth Corps." Everyone was too well aware of Maggie's unique sacrifices to do anything but nod at the euphemism. "Well Angie and I have been talking about it, and we think that it might be a good idea for her to find a way into the Visitor establishment, and do a little sightseeing in their computer systems."

"They've taken over the central L.A. library, and are using it as a central IT headquarters for the region," Angie explained to everyone with a nod of thanks to Maggie, who had found this out from that jerk Daniel. "And they've dumped most of the original employees." She deliberately skated over the concept of "dumped". "So we figured that there might be a way for me to get in. I have solid experience in library database management, and no traceable history."

"Do you really think they'll just accept somebody on second hand say-so?" Donovan asked, as if he already knew the answer. "And what good will a list of book-readers be?"

"I figure they have the all the employment records they wanted from Boston before they 'rebuilt' it. And nothing else, because I had nothing else going on that would have been noted so they might assume I was just another drone. I got out, and the Resistance didn't. Everything else went boom. That's better odds than most in favor of not being suspect. And the database can be a handy back door to other areas, trust me on that," Angie advised him in a flat voice. The others considered this.

"How you going to get in?" Tyler wanted to know. Tyler and Farber were, of course, included in the daily strategy meeting.

"Social connections… better low-level than high. Maggie's connection probably has some of those connections, someone like him with more ego than security clearance. Best way to get in is low, because nobody much will be worried about what you're doing. I'd be able to check things out, see where the weak spots are."

"And nobody would notice you 'sightseeing'?" Donovan had more doubts than the average paranoid case.

"I know how to be _very_ careful, and I've learned enough to know how to fly under the radar when looking for the basics." She smiled at Willie, who smiled back. "Inside advantage."

Donovan accepted Angie's proposition. "Okay." He wasn't all that secure with the plan, but the basic idea was good and they had few options.

Julie nodded in agreement and asked, "Everyone agree this is something to work on?"

More ayes than nays.

"Okay, next up," Donovan announced. "We're getting low on ammo and explosives, and Tyler has contacts in Mexico. He's suggested we get a few people to go down to …" he looked at Tyler, whose expression said, "_what_?" "wherever, and pick up some supplies. Working connections any closer than Mexico would be too risky right now." As usual Tyler and Farber were dispensing details on a need-to-know basis, which meant Farber would drive and Tyler would issue orders as things progressed. Better than nothing.

"Termites, or ordnance?" Angie inquired with a wicked eye toward Chris and Ham. He'd told her about the old training metaphor that Farber had brought up after the pass operation. Everyone but Farber and Tyler (who offered a predictable smirk) was clueless.

"Ordnance," Chris assured everyone as if they had doubts, "we leave at dawn tomorrow, contact tomorrow, back by late the day after."

"What can you get?" Elias wanted to know.

Tyler gestured expansively, looking like a used car salesman, "Whatever ammo your hand weapons need. Rockets for the shoulder launchers, launchable grenades, a batch of C4," he would have continued but Julie cut him off.

"All we need for now, anyway. Okay, anything else?"

Robert raised his hand halfway, and awkwardly. "News from the lab is no news. Nothing definitive yet to fight the Visitors."

Sighs and grumps all around, until Caleb declared, "Well like everything else, we just keep on keeping on."

As the meeting broke up Tyler approached Angie and Maggie, who were getting ready to discuss their plans in more detail.

"So where you gonna make these 'low level social connections'?" he asked.

Maggie shot a look at Tyler. "Catch you outside, Anj," she said and with a nod to Tyler she left.

Angie offered Tyler a cool look. "Sorry, you asked what?"

"I said, where you gonna make these connections?"

Keeping _what's it to you? _to herself Angie answered, "Wherever we can. Maggie's gonna tell this Daniel jerk that she's got a friend new in town, true, who's got a background in db management, also true, from Boston, true again. And looking for a job, true."

Tyler cocked an eyebrow. "And looking for a new friend."

She rolled her eyes. "You think it won't work?"

"I think you're new to this game. 'Friends' can get a lot more complicated than shop talk or a job offer. And they're not necessarily gonna be polite about it. Or _human_." Deep cover was something he knew well, and it seldom went exactly as planned even when it _did_ work.

"C'mere, will you," Angie led Tyler out to sit on a bench in the sun, hoping it would lighten his attitude. "That's what I'm counting on. Look, the Visitors have closer access than the humans, even at low security clearance, right? And the best thing I can find is a connection to lower level db, which will give me a starting point to suss out their system architecture, and gauge back-door access to other more sensitive areas..." she saw his eyes were starting to glaze with impatience so she cut to the chase, "So if this Daniel jerk knows a data geek, and why not because entry level is entry level and geeks seek geeks, there's my in." Angie paused for a minute, taking in Tyler's expression. Cautious, doubtful. Not, thank god, jealous, which both of them would choke on. Still, she didn't want him to think she was being naïve about this. "I _know_ what Maggie's had to get into. That's another reason why I'm looking at one of _them_. Less hormone risk. She's gonna help me out, Tyler, I'll be fine. And we've been doing some extra weapons practice, I've gotten pretty good with a disruptor."

Raised eyebrows. "You've been a busy lady." He didn't have to wonder why she hadn't mentioned it; she wanted him out of her face when she was learning anything to do with "his line of work".

"Hey, I'm learning fast, " Angie shrugged. "So you leave tomorrow." Angie had kept the shoebox-sized quarters she'd shared with Ruby. Nobody saw any reason for her to move out, and she had a teensy bit more room since Ruby's belongings had been "recycled" to benefit the rest of the rebels. They all knew she'd have wanted that. And knowing Angie now had a bit of privacy Tyler had come to her intermittently, including the night before when he'd intervened in her nightmares. She added with forced casualness, "Where to? Mex City?"

"Oh, I thought we'd swing by the Baja first, catch a few waves," his words were spoken matter-of-factly, but his expression said, _duh_. Angie responded with a smirk that said, _fine_. As they'd been able to say more to each other, they'd found they needed to say less.

Now came Tyler's dropped-head raised-eyebrow look. "Don't worry, we got a map, and a compass, and a big bag o' trail mix."

"And every thug south of the border on your payroll, no doubt."

"_And_ a truckload of explosives," Ham reminded her.

"But you'll only have 'em one way. Got enough slingshots and rocks?" She wasn't covering concern with humor; she honestly didn't worry much about him during any operation he had control of.

A casual shrug. "A few. But don't worry, we're all stocked up on lamps."

At that she whacked him on the arm. "That's getting pretty old and tired, Tyler."

He stared into the distance for a second. "Aren't we all..." Then he snapped back into focus. "Can't say I like the sound of that 'back door' stuff, though..." A flicker in his eyes told Angie he was being a wiseass. Again.

She shook her head in disgust. "You're a _pig_, Tyler."

There was the smoothly wicked smile and a sly wink for good measure. "Y'can't fool me, library lady, you're _wild_ for us bad boys."

She'd have snapped back, but that wink completely undid her. The new, more intimate, buttons he'd found to push _really_ seemed to entertain him. Angie sighed dramatically and got up, turning to look down at him.

"What am I gonna _do _with you, Tyler?"

The wicked smile turned subtly, undeniably suggestive as Tyler stood and took a step closer. "Try and come up with something by tonight." With a lecherous flick of his eyebrows he turned and walked away.

Maggie appeared out of nowhere to continue their planning discussion. She watched Tyler as he strolled away.

"Christ Angie, he must be a handful."

Angie hoped the blush set off by Tyler's parting shot was fading. She rolled her eyes and confessed, "Woman, you have _no_ idea."

Maggie was still watching Tyler cross the compound. "I don't think I _want_ to, but I admire your guts. Okay, let's get some coffee and we can decide when and where to introduce my 'lonely new friend' to Daniel's asshole buddies."


	2. Things forgotten

Tyler was almost out the door when Angie wrapped around him from behind. He jumped back a step and slammed the door, then peeled her arms away and pivoted to face her.

"_Jesus_, I can't go to Mexico with a naked woman hanging on my back!" He paused and cracked a smile. "Not this trip, anyway."

"You forgot something," she announced blearily.

She looked so foolish standing there butt-naked with serious bed-head and bloodshot eyes Tyler had to shake his head and look up at the ceiling to keep from laughing.

"Okay, lemme think… I _didn't_ wake you up when I got up," he waved a hand at the drop-down bed, "which puts me one up on Houdini, by the way… and I _did_ wake you up just now so you'd know I was leaving. What did I miss? I'd have mixed you a mimosa but you're out of champagne. And oranges." He stared down at her and laughed anyway. "_What_?"

"You didn't wish me luck, you bastard. Just because I'm gonna go data-mining while you're going _bomb_ collecting doesn't mean you shouldn't wish me luck. I wished _you_ luck."

"So did I, but I guess you weren't paying attention."

Angie _had_ been pretty out of it when he'd woken her but she was sure she'd have heard him… and being fully awake now she realized what a six-year old sounded like in a grownup's body. She had to say _something_. "Really?"

"Here, I'll do it again," Tyler reached around Angie's waist to lift her an inch or two off the floor and told her in a stern voice, "now pay _attention_ this time," just before locking onto her for a long, deep kiss. Then he set her down and demanded, "Got it?"

"Well as long as you put it that way." She tried to smooth her hair down but it was hopelessly rat's nested, and anyway she was overtaken by an enormous yawn. When she focused again Tyler was standing there wearing a perplexed smile.

"See you when I get back, Psycho." He grabbed her robe from a hook on the wall and tossed it to her. "And put something on, you look like a hooker from hell."

Before she could answer he was out the door and gone.

"I think I like 'Angel' better," Angie muttered to herself and crawled back into the bed that still held Ham's unique and very non-commercial scent: leather and gun oil. She actually was beginning to like it.

* * *

Tyler jogged to the waiting van, which was being leaned on by his waiting cohorts.

"Where you been, Tyler?" Donovan was looking from his watch, to Tyler, to the railway car he'd come from, and then to Chris and Caleb who controlled their facial expressions admirably.

Tyler would have sold his soul for a more discreet approach than fifty yards of open ground, if only to avoid Donovan's predictable mouth.

"Forgot something," he told them. Chris tossed him the keys and he climbed behind the wheel. "Now are you gonna give me a detention for tardiness, Gooder, or are we gonna get going?"

"Who'd believe it… The Fixer delayed by a woman," Donovan tisk-tisked and shook his head sadly as he poured a travel mug of coffee and handed it to Tyler from the passenger seat, "how the mighty _have _fallen."

Tyler took a long gulp and pronounced solemnly, "Thus spake the Gooder…" then turned a reptilian smirk on his tormenter, "…who slept with his rifle last night." He fired up the van and headed for the highway.

"Ouch," drifted forward from the rear of the van. Caleb.

The next few hours passed in remarkable silence.


	3. First impressions

Maggie greeted Daniel with a kiss and introduced her companion. "Daniel, this is Angela Harper." She nodded and extended her hand to the stranger who sat at the table with Daniel. "Maggie Blodgett."

_Wow Maggie was right, he does look like a real dork_, Angie thought to herself. The faux-young man sitting to Daniel's right looked a bit older (though his real age obviously was a mystery), and wore a standard red uniform rather than the brown of the Visitor Youth Corps. He was blonde, blue-eyed, blandly good-looking, pretty much fitting one of the few basic stereotypes of human males the Visitors favored. Angie shook Daniel's hand as Maggie elbowed him to his feet. A real pussy handshake, too.

"Hi Daniel, Maggie's told me so much about you." _And how._ She looked questioningly at the other stranger, who rose and shook her hand more firmly.

"Hello Angela, I'm Todd." No Visitors had last names. He nodded to Maggie, "Nice to meet you too, Maggie."

"Call me Angie," Angie instructed, and sat down as Daniel called rather too grandly for the waiter. Just about everything he did looked a little too grand. Angie inwardly praised Maggie on her guts and determination, and the ability not to have killed him yet with her bare hands.

"Champagne," Daniel ordered without asking anyone else. "Your best. We're toasting new friends," he smiled at Todd and Angie. Naturally there would be no tab to pay. Visitors never had to pay their way. When the glasses were poured everyone clinked, but Angie didn't drink.

"I'm a little sensitive to alcohol," she explained. Todd looked a little disappointed at this.

"But Daniel said Maggie's new friend was looking for a fun night out," he observed.

Angie fought down the urge to get up and leave. _This is why you're here, stupid_.

"Well I might be more ready for fun if I hadn't spent all day pounding the pavement looking for a job. As it is, one drink will put me right to sleep. No fun there."

_Nice save_, Maggie silently appreciated.

After a few minutes of empty small talk Angie smiled brightly at Todd (who'd seemed pleased with the conversation, and her, so far) and confessed, "I have to admit I have an ulterior motive." Maggie's expression changed just a bit, and Angie reminded herself to apologize to her later for scaring the hell out of her.

"Oh well," Daniel cracked and took Maggie's hand with a lame and meaningful grin, "bars are the best places for ulterior motives, right Mag?"

Maggie responded with an Oscar-winning sweet smile. "Worked for _us_, anyway."

Angie continued, "Well Maggie told me that Daniel said you're doing some work connected to the main branch of the library here in L.A… can you tell me are there any openings for a recent arrival?"

Todd looked perplexed. "Daniel didn't mention you were mining for a job."

Angie laughed and shook her head. "No, not like that. Whatever he told you is probably true," she hoped she sounded a little dense on that score, so whatever crap Daniel might have fed this guy could germinate a little more. "I'm new in the city, and didn't know a soul until I met Maggie at the coffee shop when she was on break every day from work. I'd spent too much money on a cheap motel, and she bought me lunch. I worked there a few days but got sick of the truck drivers grabbing my ass, and the boss fired me. Really, Maggie didn't set you up as an employment agency."

Suddenly Daniel was inadvertently very helpful. "Yeah Todd, Maggie said this friend of hers was all into computers and stuff, and didn't know anyone and she asked me if I had a friend I could introduce her to. I didn't even know she worked at a library until now."

_Yeah, but I did,_ Maggie mused, _so I waited until you ran through a short list of your asshole lizard friends, and cha-ching, Computer Boy was the lucky winner. _

Angie pushed her champagne glass away, looking contrite. "Maybe this was a bad idea. I'm not very good at meeting new people, I guess I say all the wrong things." She looked to Todd and Daniel, then to Maggie, "Sorry. I didn't mean to turn this into a business meeting. Have fun guys, nice to meet you Todd." She had already risen and taken several steps away when Todd called her back.

"Wait, Angela… Angie. Come back. It's not a big deal. I'm not all that great with people either, I'm used to computers. In fact I was hoping to meet someone who could teach me a little more about how to interact with humans… it's an interest of mine, human interaction and relationships." He said it so casually Angie almost missed the point. As it was she took it a little less seriously than she would have from a human male.

"Okay." She returned to the table and sat down.

"Let's start over," Maggie suggested. "Todd, this is my friend Angie. Angie, this is Daniel's friend Todd. We figured you might have some things in common."

Mollified, Todd inquired politely, "You said you're new in L.A. Where did you come here from?"

Jamming her feelings as far down inside as possible, and determined to leave them there, Angie told him, "I got out of Boston just before the regeneration." That's what the Visitors had called it, the "regeneration" of an old and chaotic city into a new, streamlined, monument to Visitor efficiency and generosity to humanity. _Yeah right. Death to the East Coast Resistance, more like, and an object lesson to everyone else. _

"Good timing," Daniel commented, casting an odd look at Maggie, who responded with a shrug.

"Not exactly," Angie corrected. "I worked in the main branch of the Boston Public Library. Everyone knows that libraries and colleges and places like that are the first places the Resistance goes looking for recruits, and the first place that the Visitors have to focus on to defend their diplomatic efforts here on Earth. I may be a computer geek, and not full of street smarts, but I could see the writing on the wall. And I had friends who were trying to convince me to join them, and I didn't want anything to do with that. I just figured the smartest thing to do was get while the getting was good, and go somewhere that I could just live my life without having everyone trying to drag me into their little power struggles against 'the establishment'. I mean, come on, what sane person says 'no' to a cure for cancer, and calls retooling inefficient manufacturing plants a threat to humanity?" She paused for a moment, aware that looking too gung-ho wouldn't serve her well. "I really don't think my friends meant the wrong thing. That's why I didn't turn them in; they were listening to the wrong people and I figured I could change their minds. But I couldn't. And then it was too late, and even turning them in wouldn't have helped anyone. Things took care of themselves, I guess." She shut her eyes for a moment. "I don't like to think about it, really." She looked at her companions again. "But if people won't let you help them, in the end there's nothing you can do but leave them to figure it out themselves. Or not."

_Of course there's no way to verify any of that bullshit story_, Angie reassured herself, _though the Visitors will be certain to have records somewhere that I actually worked at the library, that I had acquaintances connected to the Resistance, and that I never got involved myself. __And__ that I got out of Dodge just before it got blasted. Maybe that'll be enough to get in the lowest level door…_

"It's always hard when good people won't listen to reason," Todd nodded more-or-less sympathetically as far as Angie and Maggie could tell, but with an occupier's sense of righteousness.

Daniel's attitude was more straightforward. "Hey, people make their own trouble. All you have to do is obey the law, it's not brain surgery."

Todd cast a patronizing eye on his friend. "It's always more preferable, and expedient, to assimilate, rather than have to conquer by force."

_How gracious_, Angie (and Maggie) seethed inwardly.

"It is what it is," Angie offered. Using one of hers and Tyler's "ritual phrases" felt something like giving them a boot in the ass, childish though it may have been.

"What did you do at the Boston library?" Todd asked then, and both Maggie and Angie were grateful for the change of subject.

"Oh nothing too upscale. Circulation, membership… a little database work. Grunt stuff mostly." _And exactly the sort of thing the Visitors would want a human collaborator to assist with, lucky me._

Todd and Daniel shared a look. They both saw the opportunity here, though Todd kept his demeanor neutral.

"Coordinating the central library has turned out to be a more complex project than we imagined. The existing staff proved… somewhat resistant to the new configuration." It was no secret that, with few exceptions, they had been marched off for "retraining". Which meant they were now hanging in a Visitor meat locker somewhere, Angie knew. "My superiors might be interested in having someone of your experience," _and species_, "available to help."

Angie reacted mildly but smiled at Maggie and Daniel. "Well either way, I'm glad to have made a new friend who knows the way around computers. We're not found on every street corner, I'm sorry to say. I mean Maggie, we have a great time, lots of things in common, but it would be nice to know someone who could relate to my passion for orderly data storage. And since I also had a lot of academic experience with sociology and anthropology, I'll bet I can be at least a little helpful in feeding your interest in human nature."

"Direct social experience would be useful as well," Todd suggested without sounding _too_ suggestive. No more than a human guy might, anyway, Angie decided.

"Well that's fine, because I left all my textbooks behind." The yawn that followed was genuine, if just a little enhanced for the company. Angie turned to Maggie. "I'm sorry, but I really am beat. I hope you'll forgive me for cutting the evening short?"

Daniel looked put out. Clearly he'd been planning a triumph of procurement where his friend had been concerned, not to mention getting laid himself at the house that had been provided for his use. Todd didn't appear terribly affected, though.

"As long as we can meet again… I'd hate to make a promising new acquaintance only to lose her immediately."

_Oh, now he is turning on the ol' reptile charm_, Angie thought. She took the napkin from under her largely untouched champagne glass and wrote down a number. "Here's my number. It's just a furnished room that Maggie lent me some money to rent, so I stay away as long as I can and I don't usually answer the phone. But I'll return your message, I promise." She'd have to remember to have Julie arrange a separate field phone line for her, and hoped Todd wouldn't call her right away like some high school desperado. "The phone service is a little wonky, so if it doesn't work just try again." A safe dodge to buy time, as the Visitor takeover of much of the city's communications was not going smoothly. They'd have been a perfect fit with Ma Bell, Angie thought ruefully.

Angie and Todd waited discreetly while Daniel subjected Maggie to a throat-swabbing goodbye kiss.

_How does she keep from puking?_ Angie wondered, and only barely kept from gagging, herself, as Todd took her hand and kissed her cheek. Human he may look and act and even (on the surface) feel like, but she knew too well what would be revealed if she gave him a good gouge in the face.

"I'll be in touch in a few days, after our data downloads are complete." He didn't explain what was being downloaded from where, but Angie guessed it had to be the Mother Ship or somewhere else equally important to tie up the mid-low level tech guys for several days. "And I'll see if there are any openings available at the library. No promises," he warned.

"None required. Thanks Todd, it's been nice meeting you. I'll look forward to getting together again."

By now Daniel had unhanded Maggie and she smoothed her hair and shook Todd's hand. "Nice to meet you. I'm sure we'll be seeing each other again." _Here's hoping you'll be a nice pair of loafers by then._

They walked to the parking lot, and the nondescript vehicle taken from the camp motor pool, in silence. After they were belted in Angie spoke.

"You think they followed us out?"

Maggie laughed as she started the car. "Nah, Daniel will be in there until his 'friend' has to carry him out. He's got no life but booze and the Youth Corps, if you call that living."

As they pulled into the compound Maggie said, "I gotta say, I'm impressed. I was a little worried about how you'd manage first time out in the 'wild' and all, but you spun that tale without batting an eye."

"Years of customer service… you get good at telling people what they wanna hear." As they walked to the saloon Angie blurted out, "Christ, Mag, I don't know how you _do_ it." It was an observation, full of disbelief and genuine admiration, and she didn't have to explain what she meant. Her friend shook her head wistfully.

"Neither do I. And I hope you never have to find out for yourself."

Julie and Donovan were waiting when they reached the back room, and were filled in on the evening's progress.

"Sounds like it's going as planned. How'd she do?" Julie asked Maggie.

"She bullshitted 'em like a used car salesman. Even I was convinced."

"Good, no, _great_. Take the rest of the night off, ladies." Donovan cracked.

* * *

When she reached her tiny train compartment Angie found it filled to the brim with Chris Farber. It didn't occur to her to be anything but mildly puzzled. Since Donovan was back the Mexico trip must have been successful; if something nasty had happened it would have been obvious right away.

"Hey Big Bear (her occasional nickname for him, which he didn't seem to mind) whassup? To what do I owe the pleasure?" He looked a little awkward, but probably only because he dwarfed his surroundings. "Where's Soldier of Fortune at?" Her occasional nickname for Tyler, who minded it a _lot_, which was why she used it sparingly and with great personal satisfaction.

Farber spoke straighforwardly, but shifted a little. "Figured I'd tell you myself, he stayed behind. There's some new cells working down there and need some help setting up."

She nodded, took in his expression. "It's okay, I'm _not_ gonna scream or faint or anything."

"Now that'd surprise me for sure," he laughed, finding that image amusingly absurd. "Just a courtesy call is all."

She took a breath, then, and asked.

"He gone for good?" It was a fair question, and whatever the answer was would be equally fair. She'd believe that if it killed her, because she knew it was true.

Farber's head cocked as if he were speaking to a mental deficient, though the "duh" was silent.

"Now _that's_ a stupid question," he drawled, "for a whole lotta reasons. Don't know when he'll be back though."

Angie found the big man's casual demeanor reassuring. He was right, it _was_ a stupid question and for many more reasons than she could take credit for. "Oh well, he'll catch up."

He answered with a nod and a knowing smile. "He said you'd say something like that. 'night, Angie." He managed to leave without knocking things over or dragging anything along by accident.

She closed the door and got ready for bed. The evening had gone well, exactly as planned, and she was feeling good about it. She was also feeling a little scary about it, and had been looking forward to some offhand, hardass "get a grip" to help burn it off.

"Don't be such a sissy,"Angie scolded herself aloud, "you're a real live Resistance member now, playing with the big kids_._"

She felt good about that too, with a new sense of usefulness and purpose for the first time since… a long time, that was for sure.

Still, before she went to sleep, she couldn't help turning her face into the pillow to breathe in the fading traces of gun oil and leather.


	4. Close your eyes and think of Earth

_close your eyes, and think of Earth…_

* * *

She could feel Todd's rough fingertips scraping over the places he'd just gouged. Not that Angie had expected a pleasant experience. To be honest she hadn't expected anything close to this at all, more fool she. But when Todd had said he longed to understand more about human relationships, he wasn't just referring to small talk and neighborliness. While he hadn't seemed to be treating her strictly as an experiment, it was clear he was looking for "experience" with a human female, and also for whatever sort of ego boost and bragging rights his human asshole friend Daniel had encouraged him to seek. He'd been inexperienced all right. She had no idea what was "natural" between two Visitors but it was obvious that this one's behavior in bed was the sexual equivalent of speaking a foreign language phonetically… he'd gotten it from a book, or more likely from Daniel, and was going by the numbers. He was rough, and inept, and good god it had hurt like hell. Not just in the expected places where he'd thrust wildly and bit carelessly, either. The upside was that he was the fastest gun in any compass direction, literally less than a minute, but he'd done _something_ to her back, she could feel it over and over in varying places as he'd grunted (she couldn't help but wonder if he thought he was making appropriate human sounds) and thrashed, like tiny knife wounds, or ice picks, or claws. _Or claws_. She jerked away reflexively.

_Stupid move, you're supposed to be acting all impressed and romantic_. "Ow, that hurts," she whimpered a little, hoping more he'd know she wasn't referring to his sexual prowess. "What did you do to my back?" She sat up and strained to look back at her shoulder.

"It was tanareta," he explained, as if she should know what the fuck that meant.

"What's that?" She reached for his nearest hand and saw the faux-human skin broken at ends of his fingers. Moist reptile scales were exposed, and at each fingertip a tapered claw appeared. Her eyes widened, and she had to struggle not to puke. "Why did you do that to me, I'm bleeding!" She saw the blood on the bedclothes. Christ, is this the way they broke in a "virgin", just drawing blood from a different location?

To his (limited) credit, he appeared surprised and not pleased that he had hurt her, and sat up to dab at the blood on Angie's back with the edge of a sheet. "Tanareta is a substance our males secrete. It is intended to induce… I am not sure of the word… it is intended to increase the pleasure of the female, and to prevent conception."

She shook her head, completely out of her depth. "An aphrodisiac, and birth control??" What the fuck? "How can tearing someone up like that turn them on?"

Now Todd looked confused. "I do not understand. 'Turn them on'?"

Angie was surprised Daniel hadn't schooled him in that sort of slang, but he was probably not long on words. "Increase pleasure. How could you think clawing me up could do that?"

"You are my first human female," he explained somewhat matter-of-factly. "Our females have much more resilient hide." He corrected himself like a schoolboy learning a lesson. "_Skin_. It did not occur to me that I would inflict injury as tanareta was injected."

Now she was scared. "How do you know what that stuff will _do_ to a human female?"

"Others of my kind have engaged in sexual behavior with human sex workers. These females were not adversely affected. And none of them conceived."

Angie lay back down a good distance from Todd. She wanted to get up and run, dressed or not, but it was way too late to back out now. He'd gotten her an entry-level job at the library, and she'd already been tiptoeing around in the files to get a feel for what they were being used for. Willie had been helping her with some of the unfamiliar symbols denoting function that served as icons in place of what would normally be the file tree connectors in her old style computers. _Old style, I'd sell my soul for some of that right now._ So this had become part of the bargain, not just as pure payback but that in order to keep things copasetic and plausible she had to maintain a relationship with Todd, and this was the predictable direction for it to go. She'd learned that Visitors had only three definitions of male female relations: comrade, commander/subordinate (with as many or more female commanders as male), or sexual partner. There was no equivalent of friendship. Even the concept of "friendship" between members of the same gender was tenuous at best, if it existed at all.

"You kept track of them?"

As always his explanation was casual, as if it were the most normal thing in the universe. "There are a limited number of human sex workers of both gender who specialize in servicing my kind. They work in only a few districts, and are well known to us." He leaned closer, and added with a somewhat forced suggestiveness, "Would you like to visit them, and learn more about our ways in intimate interaction?"

Once again Angie forced down her gag reflex, and took one of his hands. "Oh you're plenty educational enough for me, Todd. But do you think you can be more careful with these?" She pressed a couple of his fingertips, where the imitation skin was already re-forming over the reptilian claws. "I mean I'm grateful for your consideration, but don't forget my skin is a little more delicate than what you're used to."

He considered this, and extended his other index finger. Almost immediately a claw broke through the "skin", much stubbier than the ones before. "Give me your hand," he turned it palm-up, "I can also administer tanareta in this fashion," from the base of the short claw a needlelike tip projected, a tiny drop of opaque green at its end. He pressed the finer claw into her hand. It stung, and she jumped a little. "You must receive the tanareta, or there is danger of conception." It appeared that knowledge of the "Star Child" had spread rapidly. "Unless you wish to achieve cross-species procreation?" Was that a suggestion, or a threat?

"No, I have my hands full with my own life thanks." _I'd rather be roasted on a spit than knocked up by 'your kind', Robin Maxwell's blue-eyed wonder child notwithstanding._

A knock at the door ended the conversation, and the liaison. "Anj? We gotta go, it's almost curfew."

Increased concern over random raids, ironically not all of them connected to the organized Resistance, had encouraged the Visitors to impose an even earlier curfew. It had been midnight, now it was 9 pm, which really put a crimp in Daniel's sex life since he didn't have enough juice to arrange a waiver. Todd was a little higher up the predator chain, but not much. So Maggie and Angie found themselves in the unexpected position of being grateful to the invaders for their increasing restrictions on human behavior.

When they were in the car Maggie looked closely at Angie. She knew Angie had never expected things to go this direction with Todd, and however naïve her friend had been Maggie wanted to help if she could. It had been bad enough when she'd decided seducing Daniel was the best way to go, but she didn't know if she'd have been able to manage doing the same thing with one of _them_.

_Shit, you do so know. You'd have done it like she did, because it was the best way in, you just don't know how you'd have dealt with it. Mark had a hard enough time knowing you were with someone else, no matter the reason. He might not have been able to handle a Visitor._

"How you doin'?"

Angie ran a hand over her face, and almost laughed. "The truth? He reminded me of a guy I used to date. Clueless, classless, and faster than a speeding bullet. Except for one thing…" she pulled her shirt down to expose a shoulder.

"What the hell is _that?_" Maggie exclaimed in horror. The deep scratches were still oozing a little, a puncture wound at the top of each raw track in the skin.

Angie explained what Todd had told her. "He said it didn't have 'adverse affects' on the human hookers but Mag, I don't feel so good…" What she'd first written off as disgust was now developing into full-blown nausea, and she was becoming disoriented as well.

"Let's get back, and we'll see Julie." Maggie took a shortcut back to the compound, ignoring the usual roundabout "safety route" for reasons of speed. Maggie didn't expect they'd be followed; Daniel would be more gregarious than usual tonight and would want to hear every detail from his asshole lizard buddy.

By the time they reached the movie ranch Angie was barely coherent. She felt deeply drugged and was terrified she'd been poisoned, a fear Maggie shared. So what if hookers were unaffected, maybe this was an allergic reaction nobody had experienced before.

"Stay right here," Maggie left Angie belted into the front seat and tore out to find Julie and Robert.

_Like I can move,_ was the last clear thought Angie had before fading in and out of darkness.

* * *

"Her vital signs are stable," Julie told Maggie and Robert, then shook Angie. "Angie? Angie! Can you hear me?"

Angie's eyes rolled open and closed again, she mumbled something unintelligible. Maggie, Robert, and Julie exchanged helpless looks, and then Maggie said, "I think maybe we should get Willie." Julie took off at a run and returned moments later dragging an alarmed-looking Willie.

"I do not understand," he was saying, "what has happened?"

Maggie made it short and sweet, not caring if he was taken aback. "You know she's been playing up to a Visitor who got her into the library, right? Well tonight he got his reward, only she said he injected her with some shit you guys have, birth control and aphrodisiac? Tanyourata?"

Willie's eyes widened. "Tanareta?" He moved in front of Julie and Robert and looked down at where Angie lay, pale and moaning. "But my kind do not force themselves on females of any species…" He sounded genuinely horrified by the prospect that one of his own could have done so.

Robert stepped in. "No, Willie, he didn't attack her… look she can explain it to you later, but right now you have to help us. Maggie said the Visitor told Angie that this tanareta has been used on human prostitutes with no ill effects, and prevented pregnancy. Why would it affect her this way? Could it be an allergic reaction?"

Brow knit in a puzzled scowl, Willie requested, "May I see the marks?" Julie and Maggie rolled Angie to her side and pulled down her shirt. "He treated her as one of our females. This would not have been done by those accustomed to humans. The claws were fully extended and gave larger amounts of tanareta than if adapting to a weaker species."

"Is there an antidote, to control the overdose?" Julie asked urgently.

Willie shook his head. "It must be metalized."

"Metabolized?" questioned Robert

"Yes. Her system must process it." He leaned down and looked closely in her eyes, opened her mouth and sniffed. "I do not smell poison. I do not believe Angie is in danger."

"Are you sure?" Maggie wanted to know.

Willie looked down and gently brushed some hair from Angie's face. "She will feel very ill for a while, I do not know how long. When she wakes up it will be like… some humans have described it as an overhang."

Maggie sighed explosively in relief. "A hangover, Willie. She'll feel like shit, but she'll get over it."

"I do not know how 'shit' feels, but yes she will recover."

"Why don't we keep her in the infirmary for the next day or so to keep an eye on her," Julie suggested, and with the others' help wheeled Angie into back room of the gambling parlor adjacent to the lab, and settled her on one of the cots. "Thanks, Willie."

His expression was sad. "I am sorry she has had to do this," he told the others. "She told me she believed that a Visitor would have no interest in her in this way."

Maggie patted his arm. "Just her luck to find an inquiring mind, huh." Just then Angie slurred an indistinct word.

"What was that?" Julie leaned down and asked her gently.

The sound was repeated, and before anyone could respond Maggie stepped closer to the cot and explained, "Tired, she said tired. Why don't we let her get some sleep." She hung back as the others left and bent close to listen again.

"Tyyyylr," Angie breathed painfully.

Maggie squeezed Angie's hand and whispered, "Ssh, it's okay, Ham's in Mexico, remember? I'll check in tomorrow." She misread Angie's expression as fear. "Don't worry, you're gonna be okay, you're not gonna die or anything."

With great effort Angie managed to focus Maggie's face into two overlapping blurs, but couldn't speak.

_Thanks for nothing, _she thought vaguely before passing out again.


	5. Snakebite

She was curled up on the bed, a larger bed in a larger room and he realized it made her look a lot smaller. This time she looked so… wasted, and weary. Pale, with dark circles under her eyes,. She'd lost weight, she looked weak. No bunny jammies, either, she was dressed in a beat up grey tank undershirt and black sweatpants. She looked like hell, or at least like she'd visited there recently but goddammit she smelled good like she always did. Or maybe it was just that she didn't smell like sweaty Mexican guerrillas. Anyway he had to touch her, he felt that ache in his gut he'd felt before when he wanted the same thing. She looked so alone and apart. Just like he felt. He leaned down and kissed her cheek, staying there where he could feel the warmth of her face.

_The hand on her waist was familiar, fingers lying lightly and thumb rubbing to steady her breathing, face pressed against hers, she must be dreaming of him again after so long… she'd dreamt of Tyler every night of the first week he'd been gone, but not since then. That smell of gun oil and leather was back, and something else, a smell like the road. Mmm, warm hand and warm kiss, warm soft beard… wait…_

_That's not right._

Angie struck out blindly and scrambled back, grabbing the Glock she kept concealed under the pillow, safety released and her target locked in the sight before she was fully awake. She dropped to the floor between the bed and the wall, back braced and hands locked steady and ready to shoot.

Tyler raised his hands and froze. Angie was crouched hard, combat-ready. He could see her aim was clean, and she could take his head off with one squeeze. Seconds passed as she shook her head and struggled to focus.

"Angel if it wasn't me you'd be dead already."

The face looked different. Hair grown out a bit, and a full dark beard, closely trimmed. He looked different, but the voice, the voice was unmistakable.

"Tyler?" She was sure, but not, and held her stance and aim.

"Everyone else here seems to think so."

She hesitated… she'd been stretched so thin the past couple of months, working days at the Visitor library, working with Willie every night to interpret what she was able to find out… and then there was the other thing. She hardly knew which way was up anymore. Was this really Tyler?? He looked so _different_, and just showed up out of nowhere after so long. But the voice, that voice didn't lie… she stood up, then, and took a closer look at the man whose absence had become her daily, painful companion, though she hadn't planned it that way. She hadn't planned so much of the way it turned out. Finally she lowered the gun, switched on the safety.

"What the hell kept you?"

He shrugged. "Went in deeper than I planned, but we got some good networks set up in Jalisco and further south. Viva la Resistance en Mexico."

"Yeah… Chris told me that when you didn't come back with them." It wasn't as if she'd expected to hear anything different. She checked the emotion from her voice. "Looks like you've gone all hippie. Or biker?"

Tyler ran a hand over his chin. "I like to think of it as _compa__ñ__ero_ chic."

The wiseass grin stood out brightly against the dark beard. She could see him in her mind's eye, slick and bearded and dressed in some flash European suit, like a high-end drug dealer working the system in Mexico, or disheveled and dirty working with the local rebels to set up camp in the hills. Whatever the job required. Right now he was grubby from the road, blue denim instead of the usual black, work shirt under a traditional Hell's Angel style leather jacket instead of the usual tailored leather blazer, sporting a biker tan that reached in a deep v into the open neck of his shirt. She could also see, in her mind's eye, the sharpness of the line where the paler skin would begin. He was dirty and disheveled and he looked so good she wanted to cry but managed not to.

"It works I guess," she began, then her voice choked off.

_Suddenly she could admit it to herself, she'd craved him like a drug for the past two months, craved that hardass logical simplicity and his willingness to soften it for her. She'd craved quiet acceptance, ask-no-questions companionship, the celebration in his smile when he pushed her buttons and the way he murmured deep in his throat when he kissed her in the most unexpected places. She'd craved him knowing her, and deep down had been afraid she'd lost that for good, someone knowing her that well and accepting even the parts of her that didn't make sense. She'd been ashamed of missing him so much, since she'd become so proud of herself for understanding the New World and had convinced herself that she was fine with "it is what it is", whatever "it" turned out to be. Oh, but she'd craved "it" so bad… worse than a drug, even._

"Nice place you have here," Tyler waved a hand around the room, part of the new compound they'd been forced to relocate to a month or so ago. An abandoned Coast Guard station, with lab space and canteen and genuine barracks that allowed some people more privacy than others. Considering the work she'd been doing and the strain she'd been under, she'd been given her own room as Maggie had. "Sunshine, salt air, " he continued and nodded down between them, "a big-girl bed."

"I like this place more than the others," Angie admitted a little absently as if it were a vacation spot. "The beach kind of reminds me of ho…" she cut herself off. "of where I used to live."

She looked and sounded so not herself. "Why don't you give me that?" Tyler motioned to the gun. For someone who'd often declared she was "no good with guns", Angie was showing some serious improvement. "Unless you wanna shoot me for sneaking up on you." Still she wouldn't smile but she gave him the Glock when he held out his hand. "Late night? You were crashed out pretty good for this time of day."

"Yeah well… sorry," Angie gestured sheepishly at the gun as Ham took a few steps back and put it on the table. "I'm a little edgy I guess… not much time to sleep, got a lot going on, I crash when I can." So much had happened since Tyler had left, so much she hadn't expected or wanted. God, she must look like shit. She walked around the bed to stand in front of him.

He looked at her with that open, no-explanations-needed expression, and ran a few light fingers through her hair. "Maggie told me." That was all he needed to say. "You okay?" _Shit, genius, what do you think?_

"Sure." Angie felt safer with a lie though she knew that he probably knew everything. "You?"

He didn't answer the question as he pulled off his jacket and dropped it on his bag.

_Two months of running with the high-end suits and bushwhacking rebels, playing the game to make connections and money and set up people who started out clueless and ended up a little less so, leaving them with enough money, intelligence and ordnance that they might survive and be useful to some others further north. All of that had left him burnt out and dying for air and wondering when he'd become so susceptible to that. He'd expected to return to wherever the L.A. rebel base had relocated since he'd left, and slide back into his usual tactical-hardass place. And back into that still and steady quiet with Angie that managed to keep them both upright and more-or-less sane. Of course the thing about this war shit was that you stayed locked in your own operation for however long it took and did what you had to do, and when you resurfaced everything could be different. Like Angie, and what her operation had been and still was, and what she had to do, so different from what she'd casually described the day before he left for so much longer than he'd expected. What any of them had "expected" didn't mean shit._

Angie wanted to say something else, something clever to cover her exhaustion and uncertainty. With eyes wide open she'd marched straight in over her head in so many ways, but she couldn't turn back now because so much was at stake. With Willie's help she'd learned a lot she hadn't expected to learn and had been surprised at how easily she was able to catch on to the Visitor systems at work; they really didn't worry much about security on that low a level at the library, so she and Robert and Julie were already starting to outline what kinds of things to look for that could help them. But the other things she'd been drawn into, things she hadn't wanted, they'd hardened her. Wrong… she _wished_ they'd hardened her; actually they'd just bound a ball of scar tissue around a knot of confusion and pain and disgust. She'd missed Tyler and his sheltering quiet so much… _two months_, and even though it was welcome knowledge that she could handle it (more or less) on her own, it plain _sucked_. Maggie was a perfect friend and ally, and Willie too, and Julie and even Donovan made it clear with few words how important her efforts were, but Ham Tyler was a refuge she'd never needed until he was there, and Angie never really knew how much until he was gone. No question marks, no words, no need to explain.

Shaking his head in sudden exasperation Tyler held his arms out to the side, palms up. "For christsake, c'mere will you?"

_C'mere._

That one word was all it took to launch Angie into his arms, arms locked around his neck and legs around his hips. She clung there like a baby monkey in one of those psychology experiments, desperate for physical connection, jammed her face against his shoulder and silently begged for redemption.

"Nice," Tyler mumbled against her ear as he adjusted his arms to hold her more firmly, "a little bonier than I remember, but _nice_… _look_ at me will ya?"

She lifted her face then and when he kissed her she felt him smile like he'd been saving it up since the morning he'd left her in that tiny sleeper room in the movie set train car. His beard _was_ soft, deliciously soft and warm, she wanted to lose herself in it just like she wanted to lose herself in that dark voice and those chocolate eyes of his. After a long deep kiss he drew in a long, deep breath to match it, then blew it out in a ragged rush. She couldn't keep from smiling when she heard that familiar, violent sigh of relief and the murmur of comfort and pleasure that rumbled in his throat.

"I was starting to wonder if you were _ever_ coming back, everything that's been happening here… I feel like I'm split in two," Angie gasped, "and ... and…" The words started rushing out but she put the brakes on them before they took her too far. She didn't want to talk about her split life. She loosened her monkey grip a little, her legs sliding down. He kept firm hold on her, though, leaving her bare feet balanced on the toes of his boots, and studied her face in that close, missing-nothing way that sometimes made her feel self conscious.

"What?" she asked.

Another brightly contrasted smile. "Just stocking up… down there I couldn't find anyplace just to shut up and be quiet," he told her, "just like here, the rebels can't seem to shut up… if it wasn't for the tequila I'd never have had a moment's peace." He'd been longing for the more sober peace of being with her, quiet and still and no need to explain, and getting hammered had been the only thing that killed the longing. "So when I got back to L.A. I hauled ass here to find my own personal private peace and quiet again."

Angie stared at Tyler with round, red eyes and managed a weak wisecrack, "You saying I'm better than tequila?"

"Well maybe not the _good_ stuff," he mused, and as she struggled to be pissed off he held her more firmly and nuzzled her neck, "Nice."

He set her on her feet and they looked at each other in silence. Finally she dropped her forehead against his chest and gave up a shuddering sigh.

"You got that right," Tyler concurred with the unspoken emotion.

The initial drama settled, Angie stepped back and went to the open window. "Nice day. Looks like I slept most of it away. Funny the Visitors take weekends off too, if only to fool everyone into thinking how alike we are. How about we find some coffee?" When she turned back to face him, Tyler was right behind her and wearing a peculiar expression.

It wasn't until Angie turned her back on him that he'd noticed the marks on her shoulders. "What's this?" he asked, turning her so he could examine the marks, a dozen or so of what were now clearly some sort of punctures in various stages of healing. Not very big, just ugly little perforations that resembled larger-than-average insect bites.

Angie froze. She'd almost forgotten about them. Almost. She didn't want to talk about them, or how they got there, or any of it.

"Nothing." She pulled away and headed toward the open door, but Tyler cut around her and shut it hard enough so that she'd know he didn't give a shit about the fucking coffee. His brow was furrowed, and he was dead serious.

"Somebody's been punching holes in you, Angel. You playing guinea pig for that lizard poison they're working on?"

"_No_, no, nothing like that." _Please, just let it go, okay?_ But she knew he wouldn't. She looked away, at the floor, at the wall, anywhere but at Tyler, then suddenly smiled a little too brightly and looked him straight in the eye. "No questions, remember? It is what it is." The set look on his face told her she wasn't going to win this one.

"Not this time."

Angie started to pace so she wouldn't have to look at him. "Claws, okay?? Sometimes there's claws, not all the time. Just sometimes." _Only the times I can't get him to settle for a blowjob. _Now she stopped and faced him again. "Okay?"

_Sometimes there's claws… Maggie had given him the basics when he'd run into her after his arrival. She guessed he'd be unlikely to pass judgment and had been right of course, but he hadn't bothered to think about what might actually be happening._

"Claws?" he echoed, trying to swallow his revulsion, "But,"

"Robin?" Angie finished for him. "Well _that_ asshole was trying to make her believe he was just like us, so he was doing it all by the human book. But _this_ asshole…"

She didn't have to finish. Tyler figured whatever lizard skank Angie had to deal with had no incentive to be anything other than himself with her, since she already knew what he was. That was part of her scam, after all, playing at collaborator. Suddenly he was afraid if Angie told him more that instead of saying anything helpful he'd just puke, or grab a gun and start shooting up the landscape.

"Can you please let it _go_?" She went to the door again, one hand on the knob, and waited.

The way she said it made him ignore his own concerns. He pulled her back toward the middle of the room.

"I don't think so." Quiet and simple, as he took her chin in his hand and made her look at him.

"_Please_." She didn't think she could stand attention being paid to _that_. But she stood still, aching for anything to reach the knot inside her and at least loosen it a little, as long as she didn't have to talk about it. He wasn't _supposed_ to make her talk about it.

Tyler saw something in Angie he hadn't seen before. _She's begging_. He'd rather see her cry, or rage, anything but the bleakness he saw in her eyes. He linked his arms loosely around her shoulders and leaned his forehead against her hair. "Okay."

Angie didn't move, but she shook her head slowly and whispered like a secret confession, "I try so hard to get clean... Ham, I stand under the shower until Julie yells at me to stop, every time, I almost burn my skin off, and I can't get _clean_."

"That's because you're not dirty," he told her quietly, still holding her loosely, and he cut her off when she tried to go on, "Ssh…" When he picked her up in his arms and took her to the bed it wasn't to make love, just to lie still and quiet and hold her, as much for himself as for her.

* * *

After a while Angie reached up and ran her fingers through Tyler's beard, up and down, over and over, like petting a cat.

"I grew it for Mexico," he explained, "to mix with the big time. And the small time, too, I guess. Anyway, I'm getting rid of the whole mess as soon as I can break out my razor."

She rose a bit to look him in the face. "Smile, will you?"

He flashed her a wide, barracuda grin.

"_No,_ I mean for real."

He cut it back to genuine.

"Yeah, like that, it looks brighter with all that dark around it. Nice."

"You're stealing my line."

"Tough." Angie leaned over him where he lay on his back, and continued to run the backs of her fingers along his chin and cheek. "Soft, furry, I like you like that."

He rolled his eyes and tipped his head away from her hand. "I'm not a house cat."

She frowned and abruptly rolled off the bed. "Sorry if I messed with your image. Shoot me for wanting _something_ in my life that doesn't rub me raw." Days, and nights, and everything else. She was glad her work was worth something to the rebels, was even pleased to really feel like part of something bigger than herself, but it all wore her down. Some parts more than others. She'd only realized how much since Tyler was gone, or maybe just in the hour since he was back.

He rose without comment and rummaged in the bag he'd dropped inside the door then came up, scissors in hand.

"Give me a hand?" he requested.

"Where's the razor?"

He shrugged. "I can live with soft and furry. But shaggy is _Farber's_ turf." He turned the desk chair around and sat on it backward. "A little off the back, if you please."

She took a towel from the bureau, tucked it around his neck and carefully cut off the unwanted length. When she'd finished trimming and brushed Tyler's shoulders clean Angie bent to kiss that part of his neck she couldn't resist. "I'm sorry I almost shot you."

He leaned his head forward a bit. "Do that again, will you?"

She repeated the kiss.

"Okay, all is forgiven." He pivoted in the chair. "So, what now? Wanna get that coffee now?"

"Nope." After putting the towel and scissors on the bureau Angie returned to straddle Tyler's lap, arms draped around his neck. She liked the way his hands felt as he linked them against the small of her back. Casual, as if that's where they belonged.

"I've thought of a way I can feel clean again," she whispered against his ear, pausing to run her mouth over the furred edge of his jaw. _I'll never let him shave that._

Both eyebrows raised in the sincerely serious look, he drew back and reminded her, "I told you, Angel, you're not dirty."

She looked away. "Easy for you to say." Then she looked in his eyes again, hers wide open and hiding nothing. "You don't know how deep it goes."

He frowned a little, ran his hands up her back. He noticed how she shifted when he got too close to where the marks were. "Maybe not, but you can tell me if you want to. This 'no questions, no answers' thing we got going, it's not a gag order."

She dropped forward against his shoulder and took an unsteady breath. "I know. But I think I just need that quiet, okay? I need _your_ quiet. I need it to get me clean down deep, where I can't reach it…" before she could go on he hugged her so tightly she could barely breathe, then let her continue. "Some nights when I came back from... when I came back I wanted to scream or throw myself off that lighthouse into the sea but instead I'd come in here and look at the waves, I'd lie down and be still and quiet and breathe. I did it, but I swear it made me feel more alone than I ever felt before in my life."

"You lost your 'never'," Tyler said quietly. "All that shit you'd 'never' do, suddenly you're doing it because you found out how stupid it was to think you'd never have to. And you look in that mirror after that first time and what shakes you up most is that you don't look any different, you don't _feel_ any different except smarter because you learned what 'never' is, it's bullshit. And the next time is easier, even if you don't like it any better. And you stop looking in the mirror after awhile because you know what you'll see is the same as what was always there, you just wish it would look different." His voice was almost dreamy, as if he were talking to himself.

"You say that like you were there that night."

"Not that night, maybe, but oh yeah I've been there." He rubbed a hand up and down her back, staying low enough to avoid her marked shoulders.

When she lifted her head he could see she was almost smiling. "You never disappoint me, Tyler." She framed his face with both hands and kissed him for so long they came up gasping.

"Angie," he traced a finger along her lower lip, "don't think I'm not interested… but would you mind if I get a shower first? I'd hate to mess up those clean sheets any more than we have to."

She got off his lap and told him, "Down the hall to the left. Don't you dare shave."

Tyler took his bag from the floor but before he went he stepped back to grab hold of the back of her head and bent to rub his bearded cheek against hers. "Don't you dare _leave_."

* * *

This time it was Angie who led Ham to bed, it was Angie who said "C'mere," and pulled him down with a strength that surprised him and an unwillingness to be slowed down that lit a fire in him that was equally new. At least he'd never felt it when he wasn't in charge, and he definitely did not feel in charge at the moment.

"Easy, Angel," he reminded her as she sat on top of him, managing to pull his shirt open without popping any buttons and sliding it off as he rose a little to help, "we have all the time in the world." This time she wasn't buying, and he realized to his surprise he didn't mind a bit. There was no past to make up for, no penance to pay. The prospect of full-bore, hormone-driven, bed-rolling mutual enjoyment was something Tyler could barely remember. And this time it was enhanced by a strong undertow of growing affection… new, different, and as welcome as a breath of clean air after a lifetime in prison.

"Shut up." Angie pulled the back tail of Tyler's shirt out of his jeans with a one-handed yank, deftly undoing his belt with the other, pausing only once to drop down onto him for another lung-emptying kiss.

Surrendering, he lay back with a grin and folded his arms behind his head. "Let me know when to jump in and lend a hand…"

Just then Angie sent her hand down inside his jeans the way he liked to do to her, but with much less ceremony, and his head and shoulders came right up off the bed. "_Jesus!_" then he fell back again with a guttural moan as she stretched out alongside him, one hand working unseen and the other exploring randomly as she scattered hungry kisses on his chest and stomach.

_Oh yeah, I like that sound he made… I think I'll encourage him to make more… I can do that, I bet I can control this for once…_

He let her work him over as long as he could stand, then rolled her off of him to answer her urgency with his own.

They didn't last as long as Ham usually took with her, but then Angie wasn't trying to compensate for her past sins. Other things in her past maybe, like the fact that her relationship with David included sex because she felt it was expected or deserved, because their intellectual relationship (which was what she craved most) was so fulfilling. Before that sex had been, well, recreational and/or self-indulgent, always consensual, never a matter of domination or abuse. But somehow… lacking? Lacking what drove her now, anyway. She'd felt connected to a few men without sexual attraction, and had felt sexual attraction to a couple of others without any deep connection, but she'd never experienced both at once, it had never felt so… _integrated_, she'd talked about that so much, an integrated life where all the bits fit together for a reason of their own. She'd never actually felt cheated by its absence, but suddenly she was overwhelmed by its presence. So here and now, having been deprived of the connection she'd never recognized until it was gone for two eternal months, Angie shoved aside Ham's need to treat her decently in favor of her need to treat them both… realistically. This was real, it was them, it had nothing to do with the past. And, please god she hoped, it might just make her feel clean again.

* * *

Tyler lay near-fatally spent, Angie collapsed on top of him, and pondered the mistaken nature of his expectations. Slow, easy, careful enjoyment… long ago he'd decided it was the opposite of the bastard he'd been, but maybe somehow it still had left him thinking only of himself. Oh he'd had it fast and hot before, but the difference was that this time he didn't feel guilty. Hey, no questions meant no answers, so who knew that Angie wanted to take charge until she did it? It wasn't as if he'd never wondered, he just figured she'd let him know. And fuck-all, just now did she _ever_. Still… Tyler wondered as he lay with Angie catching her breath against his chest, had she been proving something to herself the same way he'd needed to for so long? Control, power… he recognized something in her just now that reminded him of his old self. Ham couldn't say he hadn't enjoyed every minute of what had just happened, but he'd felt something in Angie's impatience that was more than mere horniness, a sort of desperation in her to make things right, to make up for something that had been taken away. And he knew it wasn't her fault, and he knew that it wouldn't work, and that it would leave her even more desperate once she'd realized it.

"Well I guess slow isn't everything…" he muttered finally.

"Uh-huh." She was equally breathless… everything she'd wanted to do to Tyler, every time he'd taken his sweet time and made her wonder what it would be like to do this, and that, and _everything_ to him… well she had the answer now. But somehow, deep inside, it still didn't feel right, not like she'd expected. It didn't make her feel _clean._ He felt so good, he always felt so _good_, and right now he felt so good hugging her tighter, turning her back to spoon against him, so good that even though something she couldn't identify might be missing it might be enough… but no, wait… when she figured out what he was up to she stiffened in his arms and said, "Please, Ham…" But she didn't say no.

"Trust me," he murmured as he strained his eyes in the fading light to look for the marks. His fingertips located the places his eyes couldn't find, little bumps (s_ometimes there's claws)._ He stroked a hand through her hair, along her cheek as she turned her face into the pillow, "trust me, Angel."

When she felt his lips press against her shoulder she shuddered.

"Easy," he whispered against her skin, "it's not 'dirty', it's poison, like snakebite, let me help take it away."

His kisses were more intense than usual as he found each wound and fastened onto it. Ham could almost feel the sickness each time, as if he were actually drawing out poison.

Angie cringed but didn't drive him off though she knew she could. All it would take was a single heartfelt "no" and he'd stop. But magic, maybe he could really do magic, sometimes since she'd known him she'd wondered if he could. He'd have denied it, of course. It was all real-world, special ops, special training, lessons from Bangkok, like fixing snakebite.

When her breath started to hitch he paused for just a heartbeat. "Ssh," he whispered. "Trust me."

She wasn't sure she trusted anyone else. But she couldn't stop shuddering as his mouth moved on her skin, fixing where she'd been marked, with kisses that drew out a poison that had nothing to do with tanareta.

When he'd found every wound he could Ham remained lying half over her, face resting against her shoulder. "There." One word, softly spoken.

She turned in his arms, but couldn't say anything even though she wanted to.

"It's gone now," he promised, "can you feel it?"

"Yeah." Eyes wide, she asked, "Could you do it again? If I needed it?"

"Whatever you need, Angie." He kissed her temple and repeated, "Whatever you need."

"I need you not to disappear. I need promises you can't keep."

The words were out before Angie could stop them, and she could feel Ham's restrained sigh. She moved away a little and looked him in the eye. "That's okay, I'll take what I can get. It is what it is."

He didn't answer, just lay watching her as her eyes closed and her breathing deepened. After awhile Tyler rose and got dressed, leaving the rest of his things in the bag on the floor. He should check in with Gooder and Parrish, and Chris. Before he left he bent down to where Angie lay sleeping soundly. He kept his voice low, rough edges smoothed for her, "I'll try not to disappoint you, Angel." She didn't stir. He straightened, looked out the window and back to the bed, then ran a weary hand over his eyes and left to search for the others. Ham didn't hear her whisper after him as he closed the door.

"You never do."

* * *

_**compa**__**ñ**__**ero**_**: comrade (Spanish)**


	6. Arrangements and Relationships

"What's this?"

Same words, same reason. Well, maybe not. There was a world of difference in the sound of them coming from Todd, so different from how they sounded coming from Tyler just the night before. Both held an edge of suspicion; maybe it was the motivation that was different. Tyler's was concern, but Todd's… who the hell knew. All Angie could think of was that maybe Todd saw more holes than he remembered putting there. Visitor males (and females-- no sexual hierarchy among their species), she'd been learning, were territorial, and a relationship was written in stone until it was formally dissolved. Correction, not a "relationship", but a "consistent mating arrangement", or so Todd had first described it when suggesting he and Angie should establish one. What the formalities _were_ for "formal dissolution" was anyone's guess. The universal one, death, certainly applied, but any other grounds or methods remained a mystery. Angie had guessed it would not be a welcome question to start their "arrangement" with. She had learned that Visitors didn't mate for life but most often for procreation or to establish political alliance. Fairly earth-like, that one. In Todd's case, however, the purpose appeared to be sociocultural research.

For that reason Angie made sure she fulfilled the a few human relationship stereotypes that Todd may have learned from Daniel or others. He especially liked the nickname "Baby", seeming to gloat a little when Angie used it in Daniel and Maggie's presence. Though a master of romantic duplicity where Daniel was concerned, Maggie drew the line at terms of endearment. And Todd seemed to have assimilated some of Daniel's male ego, in public situations anyway. Angie had to admit she was getting good at playing Maggie's game.

It helped that Maggie had encouraged Angie by telling her that when pouring it on with Daniel, every time Daniel was suckered earned her another "chip". One more bald-faced lie his ego swallowed hook, line, and sinker, one more proof that Maggie was smarter and better than he was. And all those sweet little chips would be cashed in when the Visitors got their payback. _The longer it takes, the more chips you'll cash in_, Maggie told her, _and just think of the looks on their stupid faces when they figure out they've been had!_

It helped a little, anyway.

"You should know, baby, you put 'em there," Angie purred to Todd without turning around. She pulled away from his hands, claws now re-covered by faux skin, and reminded him, "Get a move on, curfew's coming." Daniel had suggested they go to a beach house some miles up the coast whose owner had been "evicted"... she didn't want to think about who, or how. This time Todd had gotten clearance to use one of the small Visitor sky cruisers, but Maggie and Angie would still have to make their way from their faux-drop off point to the new base. Todd didn't respond to her urging.

"No, wait, these are different," he held her still and she could feel his now-normal finger touch one place, then another, that she couldn't see. "These are small colored marks that surround the tanareta ministrations."

_'Ministrations', right... you mean the places where you inject your lizard sex crap._ She said nothing, but stood still. "Maybe I'm having a reaction again. I told you I got sick that first time." She could feel him looking closer.

"No, that would affect all the sites. This appears on only," she tried not to flinch as he touched one, two, three places, "these areas. I believe I have seen similar marks before... Maggie has had them on her neck now and then."

_Oh, shit... _Suddenly Angie remembered Ham's intensity as he "drew out the poison"... of course. Not your typical hickies to be sure... but now that she thought of it, that he'd left some marks was no surprise. _Think, think! Spin some bullshit, you're good at that... _Too late.

"They appear to be human love marks," Todd mused aloud, sounding more perplexed than anything else. He seemed to be waiting for response. "Angie? I believed we had an arrangement?"

"You mean a 'relationship'?" Angie faced him, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. "An 'arrangement' is for music, it's for invasions, it's..." she stopped herself. She had to get a grip... it had been harder since Tyler had returned, so hard to just come with Maggie to meet Daniel and Todd as usual. Not because of what Tyler might think, though... because Angie knew she wouldn't be able to stop wanting to be with _him_ instead of this... lizard. Life was short, _time_ was short... she didn't want to waste it. _This isn't a waste, this is important._

Todd surprised her by correcting himself, even looking a little apologetic for the error. "A 'relationship'. It can be hard to remember we have different words for things. But you have not answered me. Those are human love marks, are they not? I believed we had a 'relationship'."

It was hard for Angie to get her head around the clinical way he said it, even though she knew jealousy was something Visitors didn't waste on "arrangements". They saved it for professional politics and wrangling for power. Their "consistent mating arrangement" was a fact, and he saw this as a denial of that. He looked almost as if he were going to lecture her, remind her of the custom that she had agreed to become involved in with him. _Shit_.

"Okay, look..." Angie began. Todd was waiting, not patiently but inquisitively. "Sit down, will you?" He sat on the rumpled bed, and she pulled up a chair, thinking faster than she could remember doing in her adult life. "There's this guy I was seeing. I'd been traveling with him for a while on the way to L.A., and just sort of got involved. But he left, months ago, just up and left and I thought he was gone for good, before I even met you. He came back yesterday... it's _over_really, but I didn't know how to tell him." She scrambled for something that a Visitor might comprehend. "He didn't give me a chance to tell him; he's not really all that reasonable, you know?" For good measure she added, "He can get mean if he doesn't get what he wants.

"So he re-established your relationship based on your previous arrangement."

It all sounded so clinical, but he seemed to accept it. "Yeah. I'll find a way to convince him we're over when I see him again, but I'll have to be careful. If I tell him about you, about _us... _well I think it would be safer for me if I didn't."

Todd nodded, as if a contract had been signed. He didn't seem unduly concerned about her well being, seeming to accept the threat of violence as a given between humans. "You will dissolve your arrangement tomorrow. Good. It would create a conflict if you could not. Especially because I have been given knowledge of an upcoming increase in security level. Part of the determination was that you were considered acceptable because of our... relationship."

Angie knew that Todd had no great expectations of high levels in the Visitor hierarchy. In fact it had been a surprise to her that he hadn't pretended to any in order to seduce her. That had been a plus for her, erasing any obvious motivation on her part. "Increase in security level?" Her curiosity overcame the immediate issue.

"I cannot tell you the details, that is for your superior to explain. But a small increase is imminent."

"Oh Todd, I'm so glad," Angie threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. _Payback's a bitch, dude_ she warned silently. "It'll mean a pay increase, and maybe I can get my own place instead of keeping that cheapshit room in that paranoid lady's place." She'd convinced Todd that her landlady was a high-end Visitor informer who lived to make trouble for anyone if it meant advancement for her. It hooked closely enough into Todd's inbred sensibilities that he accepted it without question.

They dressed and were ready to knock on Maggie and Daniel's door to encourage them to get going and beat the curfew back to L.A. when Todd advised Angie, "You will be able to provide proof of the dissolution of your relationship with the human male? To affirm our arrangement."

Not knowing at all what he was talking about, not in terms of specifics anyway, Angie assured him, "Sure, baby. Next time we get together... day after tomorrow, right? We're gonna go to that new place, the one that serves both Visitor and human cuisine." Angie hoped she'd be able to keep her dinner down as she was forced to watch Todd scarf live... whatever. In the meantime, she'd ask Willie to fill her in on what might convince Todd that she and the "mystery man" were officially quits.

"Good." Now Todd actually smiled. It was so hard for Angie to figure if he was just aping human behavior or if it was something whose meaning he'd actually learned. "Once we are certain of our arr... our relationship I will be able to tell you some non-security related things about the change in your work."

Well here was a chance to play him. "Can't you tell me anything now?" She sidled closer and slipped her arms around his waist. "_Please?_"

"Very well..." he smiled again, this time indulgently. "The security between file systems has been greatly increased due to concern of overlap between internal divisions of the occupation."

_Shit... this was supposed to be good news??_

"Beginning some time next week you are to be transferred to a circulation system in the internal biophysics library. I cannot divulge the security level, but the parameters of your work will be narrowed." He misread her expression. "Do not be concerned, you need not have knowledge or experience in biophysics."

_Yikes._ _An internal Visitor library... _Already the wheels in Angie's head were turning. Suddenly she noticed Todd leaning closer. She knew by now this was her cue to kiss him, so she did.

_Bleah._

"Now let's get Daniel and Maggie, and return you to your lodgings before curfew. It is getting late."

"Yeah... good thing you got the company car, huh?"

* * *

"Maggie, I'm being moved to the internal biophysics lab, Todd just told me. Something about wanting to narrow security parameters or something... but mine is going to be increased. Just a little he said, but everything counts!"

Maggie was trying to get them to the Coast Guard station without breaking the speed limit, or the curfew. "Biophysics..." she was silent for a bit. Then as she skidded the small car into the motor pool garage she locked eyes with Angie. "My god, Robert and Julie will flip!"

Angie and Maggie fairly ran to the kitchen (their impromptu late night briefing room) for the regular meeting with Julie, Donovan, and Robert that was scheduled after every "social evening" they shared with Daniel and Todd.

"Wait Mag," Angie grabbed Maggie's arm and pulled her to a stop in the hallway. "There's a little problem... Todd found out about Tyler." When Maggie went pale Angie added hastily, "No not about him specifically, but that I saw someone else. Like, intimately, besides him. Long story short, my 'arrangement' with Todd has to be exclusive, like Visitor-type, in order to prove my trustworthiness. Thank god it's very cold and technical, no jealousy crap. Just yes, or no, period. There seems to be some way to 'prove' it, but I'll have to ask Willie about that."

The two women hadn't noticed Willie standing just around the corner. He'd paused en route to the animal lab as he heard his name. "Angie, Maggie," he called to them. "I am sorry, I did not mean to sleeve drop. But I heard you, Angie, say you must present proof of something to Todd?"

"Yeah, Willie, he's figured out I was seeing someone else," Angie knew she didn't have to say who, it was common knowledge that Tyler had de facto moved into her quarters the day before. "And in order to cement my work situation I also have to cement my situation with Todd. He said something about providing 'proof of the dissolution' of the other relationship. If you can tell me what would work, I'd really be grateful."

Willie's frown deepened. "If it is acceptable, I believe it would be a good idea for me to take part in your meeting."

* * *

After Maggie had filled in the others on the new expansion of Youth Training that she'd gotten from Daniel, Angie excitedly shared her information.

"Now I don't know jack about biophysics, but I was thinking... if I can get a handle on what earth-books the Visitors are concerned with that deal with stuff that might affect them, life-and-death-wise, _you_ guys," she indicated Robert and Julie, "might be able to suss out what they're trying to avoid. And come up with a nasty surprise."

"Well I take it back," Donovan announced, "librarians aren't all a bunch of dusty dweebs."

For all the good news to be had, Julie focused on Willie with a look of concern. "Willie, something is bothering you. Do you think the Visitors might be setting Angie up?"

He shook his head slowly. "No... it is not that. I believe your plan is a good one." He looked at Angie. "There is something Angie mentioned before the meeting." Clearly he felt uncomfortable bringing it up.

"It's okay, Willie," she reassured him. "No secrets here. Hell, it's why I got in so deep in the first place, right?" She patted his arm before addressing the others. "I've had to ask Willie's advice, because my 'contact' Todd has figured out that I have a man in my life, in addition to a lizard." She glared at Donovan, whose mouth was about to open. "None of your damn business, that's how. Anyway, if I can't prove to him ours is the only ongoing 'arrangement', it screws up my security clearance." Confused looks all around. "It's too complicated to explain. I'm learning more about Visitor male-female relationships than I ever wanted to know, obviously, so you'll just have to trust me on this. I asked Willie to let me know what passes for 'proof'."

All eyes on Willie, he spoke hesitantly, and mostly to Angie. "As you say, you have learned much about Visitor relationships between male and female. They are 'arrangements', with very specific behaviors and parameters. Among the elite, and military, they are devoid of emotion and are matters of convenience and advantage. Todd has expressed the additional desire to learn about human relationships. But the proof he is asking for is very specific."

"Jesus, Willie, what's bothering you? Do I need a Dear Jane letter written in your language, a severed body part, what?"

He flinched at the words "severed body part". "There are two proofs of dissolution of an intimate arrangement among my kind. One is the obvious death of a partner by natural causes. The other involves a form of ritual. It was once very formalized, but throughout many generations and millennia it has devolved into something whose evidence can be observed after the fact, rather than in the ritual."

Nobody could remember hearing Willie speak so clearly before.

"So what's the 'evidence'?" Robert pressed.

"The second form of dissolution involves physical combat."

"To the death??" Maggie gasped.

Willie shook his head, "No. But there must be evidence of combat, visible wounds though their severity or number are not defined. The evidence of such combat would be considered valid proof of dissolution. Both male and female would bear the evidence."

"But he knows he's never going to see this 'other guy'," Donovan observed.

"That is correct." Willie was still looking at Angie. "Angie alone must present evidence of combat as concrete proof of dissolution of her other relationship. While it is true she is human, the absence of such evidence would prevent Todd's commitment to their arrangement, and her position."

Finally Angie spoke. "And he already knows that violence in a human relationship can lead to its 'dissolution'... so it would be twice as powerful, I guess." Everyone was staring at her. "So I guess I gotta get the crap knocked outta me, huh? Well don't everyone look so horrified, will you? You've all seen people go through worse for the Resistance, I'm sure."

"But who..." Maggie asked. The others were still trying to get their head around it.

"Someone who knows how to make it look good without breaking my jaw, I guess..."

Just as she spoke, there was a knock on the doorjamb. "If you master planners have left any coffee, one of us _genuine_ freedom fighters could use a cup." Tyler. Caught out in the middle of six wide-eyed stares, he rolled his eyes. "Well shit, _now _what did I do to piss everyone off?"

Angie cast a quick look around the table. "We're done here." She rose and went to Tyler. "Let's take a walk."

"What part of 'coffee' didn't you understand?" he glared at her.

"The part that didn't sound like 'let's take a walk', _okay?_" She grabbed his arm and shoved him out of the room in front of her. Ambushed by her insistence, he let her.

* * *

Back in the kitchen, Donovan was the first to speak. "Shit. She's gonna ask him to... " He looked at Julie, Robert, Willie and Maggie in blank disbelief.

"Yeah," Maggie confirmed what they all were puzzling over.

"Well I hope she knows what she's doing," Donovan muttered grimly.

"She'll be okay," Maggie told them.

"I think so," Julie concurred, then added quietly, "But Tyler... I'm not so sure."


	7. Whatever you need

Ham Tyler leaned on the sink, gasped a breath, and stared at his face in the mirror. _Who the fuck are you?_ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and immediately noticed the smears of blood on his knuckles. He doubled over and started heaving again.

* * *

_At first he couldn't understand why she'd wanted to hustle him off on his own. "You need to get in a fight? Then why walk away from Gooder, he's always up for that. You could beat him without busting a brain cell."_

_She'd shaken her head, impatient. "No, I don't mean an argument, I mean a __fight__." _

_That was when she'd told him that lizard skank had figured out some things. Shit, he should have been more careful last night. Snakebite, my ass. _

_"And the only way these guys believe anybody is splitsville is if they see the evidence, ah, writ large on their face, I guess you could say." She'd waited, waited for it to sink in._

_He'd stared at her when he finally got it. "You're saying to convince this lizard you're committed you need to look smacked around." _

"_I'm saying I need to __be__ smacked around. Ruby's passed-along makeup secrets aren't gonna cut it. I need a fat lip, a black eye, whatever. And some defensive stuff too, I guess."_

"_And you're telling me because…" Dawn broke. "Forget it." He'd stomped off, left her standing on her own outside the main building as he headed for the lighthouse stairs. She'd chased him, half a step behind all the way._

"_Tyler, __stop__," he'd felt her grab for the back of his jacket but he kept climbing as she didn't let up for a second, "I need somebody to do this for me, I can't do it myself. And before I get the 'it's my night off' or any other wiseass bullshit, you and I both know that any of our comrades here could easily mess me up good, permanently, without meaning to."_

_He'd finally stopped and turned to face her as they stood on the upper deck of the lighthouse. The wind was blowing her hair, she was all worked up and her eyes were on fire and she wasn't gonna take no for an answer, he could tell. When had she turned from a terrified uncertain refugee into this insistent, insane person? He almost was startled, but not quite, when she answered the unspoken question._

"_While you were in communing with the __compa__ñ__eros in __Mexico, asshole, that's when I changed. I grew up. I got that sense you said I didn't have before. And right now I'm asking you for this because I know in your line of work you've done your share of inflicting damage without leaving marks. So I figure you can do the opposite, too, without fucking me up completely."_

_She knew who he was; he'd known that for a while but never really grasped how devoid of judgment her knowledge was. "Why not ask Farber?"_

_She'd stood there, glaring. '_Coward'_, her eyes said. "You're all about stepping up and showing your balls, Tyler. Or is it all talk?"_

_They'd gone on like that, playing chicken in the salt air, until one of them folded and posturing gave way to pleading. He couldn't remember which one of them blinked first. He'd love to believe it was her, but couldn't swear to it._

"_How bad does it need to be?" he'd asked when they'd gone down the stairs and into an empty room in the main building. _

"_Looking worse than it really is would be okay, fat lip, black eye, bloody nose, like I said." She'd paused then, attempted an offhand shrug. "Relax, Tyler. I learned how to take a punch before I learned how to ride a bike. I guess dad did me a favor."_

_He'd known that, or something like it, Tyler realized. More knowledge without judgment. She'd read his hesitation, and grabbed one of his hands._

"_Please__. If you can't do this, if you won't, there's more at risk than my job. I'm finally out of the computer room, Tyler, and I'm neck deep in the nastiest shit I've ever had to do, and if you can't do this for me, it's all been for nothing. I don't think I can live with what I've been doing if it's all gonna be for nothing. I __know__ you of all people can understand that." She'd grabbed him by the lapels then, stepped close to look up at him. "Ham, please, __you promised, 'whatever you need', you said, and I need you to help me.__"_

_It was the way she was looking at him that defeated him... desperation, and trust. _

"_Okay." __Then he forced his brain on autopiliot, drew back his hand, and gave her what she needed._

* * *

Donovan recognized the voice behind the full-throated retching he heard coming through the door of the men's shower and bathroom. Any other time the sight of Tyler bent over the sink, puking his guts out, would have elicited one of a rich assortment of smartass comments, but Donovan had just seen Angie heading to the infirmary so Julie could superficially patch up the damage that would, in the end, protect them all. When Tyler raised his head the look on his face shook Donovan. Their eyes met in the mirror for just a second, but it was long enough for Donovan to know he was seeing more of Ham Tyler than he'd ever wanted to, and definitely more than he was entitled to.

Donovan backed from the room without a word, letting the door swing shut, and collided with Chris Farber in the hallway behind him. Farber reached for the door.

"Don't," Donovan told him. For once he was certain, no matter how many years of friendship Tyler and Farber had shared, no matter what they'd been through together, this was something nobody was meant to see.

Farber studied the other man, and then stepped back. "Right." He glanced back at the closed door, the room beyond it now silent, as they walked away. "This one's gonna take a while."


	8. More than it does you

Angie and Maggie got back early from their "date" with Todd and Daniel. The night's hookup had begun and ended at the Visitor/human cuisine restaurant known as The Best of Both Worlds.

"Jesus, Angie, what happened to you?" Daniel gasped when sat down at the table. Tyler had done a more than adequate job: Angie's left eye was black and swollen, her lower lip split and puffy at one corner and she sported a butterfly-bandaged cut on her right cheek. The bruises on her wrists and left forearm were less evident, but she'd kept the sleeves of her shirt pushed up just in case.

"Somebody didn't take 'get lost' very well," Maggie explained with the proper outraged edge. "But he's gone for good now."

"Said he didn't need to put up with my shit to get laid," Angie added for good measure, "but figured he'd leave me with a little goodbye present."

Todd didn't comment except to say, "Well it's good that he's gone, then. Are you all right?" It was difficult to tell whether or not that last comment was merely an affectation for the benefit of his human companions.

Angie feigned anger. "Why don't you look again and you tell _me_?" she snapped, leaning closer to get in Todd's face. Surprisingly he appeared taken aback.

"No, I meant there is no permanent damage? No injury that will not heal?"

"No, nothing broken. Not for lack of effort. But I got in a few shots myself… his next conquest might have some questions about the nice deep stripes on his face and that finger I think I broke." She dropped her head in her hands for a few seconds, then sat up and shook it off. "I'm not good for a long night, if that's okay. Why don't we order and maybe have a drink, but the sooner I get home and get some sleep the better. The pain kept me up most of last night."

They shared a subdued dinner with little conversation. Daniel ventured a few mostly-nosy questions regarding Angie's "ex" but was roundly shushed by Maggie. As for Angie, her face and head really had been throbbing since last night. Nothing broken, and she knew Tyler had pulled his punches as best he could while still leaving something for Todd to believe in, but a beat-down was still a beat-down. And for all the practice her drunken asshole of a father had given her, it had been a very long time since the last time. She managed some soup and a beer, but her mouth and jaw were sore so she contributed little to the conversation Todd was carrying, about his studies on the socioeconomic development of post-plague Europe. He really was a study hound, Angie had come to realize. She found it hard to believe that the mere urge to conquer could drive that kind of mania for learning. After about two hours she was ready to pass out from exhaustion, and was mightily grateful not to have puked up her small dinner as Todd dined on a basket full of little white mice (did they have to be so _cute_?) and several species of large, less endearing insects.

Gathering her shredded resources Angie managed to crack, "Cancer shmancer, if you guys would just eat your weight in mosquitoes and cockroaches humanity would be eternally grateful."

"Sorry guys, I really think I should get her home… thanks for dinner, Todd." Maggie's good manners were just for show; no Visitor paid for any meal anywhere, whether Visitor establishment or human.

They walked to the parking lot together, where Todd's now permanently-assigned sky cruiser was "parked" alongside the nondescript Dodge that Maggie and Angie routinely took from the camp motor pool. Angie was grateful for a reason to dodge Todd's kiss goodnight. "Please, wait until I heal a little, okay?" He nodded with an understanding obviously born of the knowledge that their "arrangement" was secure.

"Of course. Here," he reached in the pocket of his uniform tunic and handed Angie a pair of the oversized sun visors the Visitors used to shade their sensitive eyes from Earth's bright sunlight. When she looked puzzled he explained, "I have learned that facial injury is a source of social discomfort for human females. Please, you may use these until your injuries have healed."

Angie shot a look at Maggie, who had just managed to pry Daniel's face from hers, then responded, "Uh, thanks Todd. You're right, it'll give me less to explain, though I don't think anyone at work is going to notice one way or another."

That seemed to remind him of something. "On Monday morning you will begin work in the biophysics division library. You will be oriented and trained by Division Commander Maxfield. Simply report to your previous station and you will be directed from there."

"I almost forgot…" Angie hugged Todd briefly so as not to appear ungrateful. "Thanks. And thanks for these," she put the visor on and was surprised that what appeared to be very dark glasses didn't interfere with her vision even at night. "I'll be stylin' Visitor in no time."

_As fucking if._

* * *

"I think we should approach this from a different direction."

Robert Maxwell and Julie Parrish were discussing the newly revealed possibilities of Angie Harper's job at the L.A. central library, now the Visitor's Central Library.

Julie countered, ""Well she'd never be able to memorize the types of earth publications the Visitors might be paying attention to. And even with her attachment to her contact," Julie steadfastly relied on neutral terms to characterize both Angie and Maggie's unwilling relationships to Visitor insiders, "writing things down is out of the question."

"How about this," Robert suggested, "we give her a list of terms, or well known texts, to look out for. It would be a lot less to memorize, and if she came back to tell us that she'd found anything referring to them we could narrow down the search for a biological weapon."

At that point Maggie and Angie entered.

"Early night," Maggie told Robert and Julie, "on account of Angie's 'situation'."

"So was he convinced?" Julie asked.

"Yeah, seemed to take it all as natural as sunrise. Or whatever they take as natural," Angie confirmed. She noticed that both Robert and Julie were staring, and remembered she was still wearing the Visitor visor. "Oops," she took the glasses off and gestured with them, "Todd gave 'em to me, said he'd learned that for human females 'facial injury is a source of social discomfort'. Must have got it from those movies in the 50's, beat up wives and sunglasses and all that." Now that her face was uncovered the looks on the faces of the others morphed from curiosity to unease. "I know, I look like I got pounded into the wall." Suddenly she felt an urgency to explain. "Look, Tyler only did what I asked him to. What I _begged_ him to… I know it doesn't look like it but if he wasn't careful, or if I'd asked someone else to do it, my nose might be folded against my face or my jaw might be broken."

Julie reached up and took her hand, drawing her into an adjacent seat at the long kitchen table. "Hey, we're all together on this, remember? You don't have to explain anything to us. Neither one of you do."

"We just wish there'd been some other way…" Robert added, "but since there wasn't you need to know we're glad it worked. And you can forget any questions you might have left about whether you're really contributing here, or if you're just along for the ride."

This made Angie smile. "Willie has got a big mouth. Must come from swallowing live guinea pigs."

"Willie likes us," Maggie told her. "He likes that we're trying to outsmart his people instead of just killing them off. So I think he worries about you and me more than the others."

"Well as long as we're all here let's get an early start," Julie suggested. "Robert and I have been discussing ways to best take advantage of your position without endangering it, or you."

"But isn't Donovan supposed to be here too?" Angie asked. He was the third member of the triumvirate of resistance leaders. For tactical meetings, Tyler and Farber were usually added as well.

"We'll fill him in."

It didn't take long, about fifteen minutes for Robert and Julie to share their ideas regarding tracking the Visitor's Earth biological interests.

"I don't think I'll have too much trouble once I get a grip on what I should be looking out for. If I can identify a trend then maybe we can figure a way for me to focus on details. Willie can help me make the leap between Earth and Visitor perspectives." She paused. "I've been wondering… there have to be more like Willie out there. You know, just regular Visitor species who aren't into the conquering thing?"

"Donovan's connected to a Fifth Column. You may or may not meet Martin, but his and other cells are very active," Julie informed her.

Maggie shook her head. "No, I think what Angie means is that we both figure there have to be regular, non-aligned types out there who might be willing to help us on our end, without being part of an organized Visitor cell. If we can do freelance, so can they."

Suddenly Julie looked concerned.

"You're not thinking about Todd? You can't possibly know enough about him to be sure of anything except that he's engaged in a quid pro quo 'arrangement', in every Visitor and human sense of the word, with you. Probably to advance his own position, if you prove useful to the Visitors even in a small way."

"I'm just keeping an open mind," Angie reassured her. "You're right, at this point I can't usually tell which behavior and facial expressions are genuine and which are just the result of study and coaching by Maggie's Ball and Chain. I guess him giving me the visor got me thinking… he could have learned the 'social discomfort' thing anywhere, but I doubt a book, or god forbid _Daniel_, would have told him to hand over Visitor equipment to a human. Just something to keep in mind if things get more, I dunno, clear as we go along."

Robert and Julie looked at one another for a moment. "Of course no reasonable idea is worth ignoring. But you don't engage anyone without talking to us first, understood?" Robert declared firmly.

"Of course not," Angie shot back with a bit of an edge. "I'm not screwing lizards, and getting beat up on purpose, so I can fuck it all up on a whim."

"Easy, Anj," Maggie soothed and laid a hand on her friend's arm. "We're all on the same side here. If we weren't we'd all be Visitor snack food by now."

Julie defused the atmosphere but standing and concluding the meeting. "Okay, I think we're done here. Let's get together again Monday evening after you get back from the Library, Angie. You'll have a little better idea what you'll be doing and where you'll have access by then."

"Yeah, okay," Angie and Maggie got up to go. "Look I'm sorry Robert… I know what you meant and I know why you can't leave anything to chance. It's been kind of a shitty few days, y'know?"

Maxwell smiled sympathetically. "No apology necessary. I meant what I said… you and Maggie are making a contribution that nobody else could make even if they had the guts to. Between you and me, armed combat sounds easy by comparison."

"Don't grovel, it implies weakness," Angie joked to lighten the mood. "I guess we all do what we… whatever," she shrugged.

As they left the kitchen the four of them ran into Donovan, who was arriving at the time Maggie and Angie had been expected to return.

"Early night," Angie told him.

"Robert and I will catch you up," Julie added.

Donovan didn't reply. He just stood staring at Angie. _No wonder Tyler lost his lunch_. _Could I have done that if Julie had asked me?_ He didn't ever want to have to find out.

"How you doin'?" he asked Angie.

"I'll live... you know, viva la Resistance and all that." She couldn't think of anything else to say.

Thank god Maggie stepped up and took her arm announcing in an exaggerated volume, "Now if you all don't mind, the Sisterhood of Mata Hari is gonna take the rest of the weekend _off_. That means no meetings and no firing drills and no _nothing_ all day tomorrow. Not unless the Mother Ship comes calling, personally. Got it?"

"That sounds all right to me," Julie laughed. "What do you say, guys?"

Robert smiled as well. "Sure. We won't even dock you a day's pay."

Donovan just nodded, still caught in his own thoughts. Angie took his arm and leaned closer.

"Cheer up Gooder, I promise you get the next shot at me, if you have the balls." As intended, this broke Donovan's dark reverie as he jerked away and answered with a smirk, "Great, maybe we can sell tickets."

"The Crusading Reporter vs. The Library Geek," Maggie suggested, "We'll make enough to finance the whole Resistance!"

Julie and Robert had already gone about their business, leaving Donovan standing on his own. "Okay, okay, I get it. Just tell me, after all of this," he indicated Angie's face, "did it work?"

She winked with her good eye. "Like a charm, Gooder, like a goddamn charm."

Suddenly Donovan's expression was serious again. "It's probably none of my business, but I think maybe you should let Tyler in on that."

Maggie squeezed Angie's arm and walked away.

"Where is he?" Angie asked. Tyler hadn't returned to her room last night, though his stuff was still there. She hadn't been surprised, really. After all, she'd made him give up his last "never", one that she guessed he'd managed to get back since he first lost it. Well he could kiss it goodbye now.

"I saw him headed toward the beach awhile back after our tactical meeting. He bunked in the men's barracks last night."

Angie stood looking at Donovan for a moment. There was more to him than what Tyler usually ranted about. Then again, there was more to Tyler than what "Gooder" usually ranted about. Something told her that both of them knew that, though they'd rather be drawn and quartered than admit it out loud.

"Thanks, Good…" she corrected herself. "Thanks, Mike. You're right, it's none of your business. But thanks anyway."

* * *

She sat down on one of the broad concrete steps that led from the lighthouse to the beach. Two steps up from where Tyler sat, elbows leaned on knees, contemplating the waves by the light of the full moon. Not so different from the way they'd been sitting that first night in L.A. though their positions were reversed now, in more ways than one.

"He bought it," Angie said simply, getting no response but the whooshing sound of the waves.

After a couple of minutes she started to get up, figuring it might be wiser to leave him on his own, but she was stopped as Tyler reached back to lean a hand on one of her feet as he scooted up to the step just in front of hers. He grasped her other foot and pulled them both forward to reach along either side of where he sat. Without a word Angie laid her hands on his shoulders, and when he leaned back solidly against her she reached around in front to where he could surround her hands with his own, pulling her closer around his shoulders as if bundling into something warm. When he rested his head back against her shoulder she bent hers forward to where she could lay her cheek against his and feel the brush of his beard as he moved his face back and forth a couple of times. For her, or for himself, it didn't matter.

"Tyler," she began in a whisper, "I'm…"

_I'm sorry it had to be you, I'm sorry the ghosts got stirred up, I'm sorry you had to remember what you've been trying so hard and so long to forget…_ _I'm so sorry I took your last "never"... _

So many things she wanted to say, so few that would really matter when it came down to it.

"Ssh," he cut her off and raised her joined hands to kiss them once, then gathered her arms a little closer around his shoulders. "It's okay." that dark voice filled her ears, the one she wanted to lose herself in, somehow it fit perfectly with the sounds of the water and breeze, "Just be still," he murmured, "be quiet," Angie felt his familiar deep inhalation and the exhausted sigh that followed, "breathe." She relaxed and laid her face in the join of his neck and shoulder as they settled closer together.

They sat there in silence for a long time, but not before one more dark-velvet word reached her:

"Nice."

* * *

Donovan, Caleb, and Chris Farber were anticipating the enjoyment of a little desperately needed down time over the next 36 hours or so. They'd brought their mugs of evening coffee out to enjoy the fresh air, lounging on the long-abandoned permanent concrete tables and benches of the outdoor mess area. First Caleb and Donovan had ventured to the edge of the cliff to catch a glimpse of the moon on the water.

"Man, when was the last time I could just look out at the water and not over my shoulder," Caleb mused. As the moon emerged from behind a cloud, he caught sight of Tyler and Angie, still as a tandem statue near the bottom of the steps. "Looks like Angie and Tyler are making their peace with things," he observed and returned to join Farber where he was laid out flat on one of the tables staring at the sky. Donovan glanced down, then followed Caleb.

"I never thought I'd say it," Donovan admitted as he climbed up on another table nearby, "I guess I'm the last one here to figure out that Tyler is actually capable of falling in love with somebody who can't shoot straight."

"Twice, if you count his marriage," Caleb drawled.

After a moment or two of stillness a laugh could be heard rumbling from the darkness where Farber lay.

"Guys, trust me," he offered in a knowing voice, "he's only just figuring it out himself."


	9. Compromising positions

Donovan waved the copy of the LA Times as he entered the lab.

"Julie, Martin wants a meet tonight."

Julie looked up from her latest slide of Willie's blood, which showed no reaction to the latest bacilli. "They've been laying low for a while now. Any idea what's up?"

"Nope. Just the usual. Martin's getting cute, though." With a dark laugh he handed Julie the paper, folded open to the "Men Seeking Men" segment of the personals ads.

She began reading aloud, "Blond blue eyed adventurer seeks ballsy Irishman to share a fifth." Her eyebrows rose. "'Ballsy', huh?" She handed the paper back to Donovan.

Donovan's and his Fifth Column contacts ran ads in the personals to let each other know when there was something to discuss. They had agreed on a variety of euphemisms and metaphors, finding a way to indicate the number five without being too obvious. The meeting places and times had been agreed upon some time ago, and depended upon which week of which month the ad appeared.

"Well it's the third week of May, so we meet at the zoo, they're open late on Fridays. The reptile house." Donovan shuddered. "Can't say that he doesn't have a sick sense of humor. If it isn't urgent we can get the others together in the morning to check out what Martin's got to tell us."

* * *

Martin stepped out of the corner where he'd been observing a cage full of geckos as they darted aimlessly about their prison.

"I know how they feel," he said by way of greeting Donovan. Martin was dressed in typical human fashion, blue jeans, t shirt, and a windbreaker zipped up halfway. Normal sunglasses were perched on top of his head.

"You 'n' me both." Donovan slapped Martin's shoulder. "Good to see you in one piece. It's been awhile."

They began walking, an endless circuit throughout the nearly empty building.

"We don't have anything much to do except wait to see what happens with the central library. It's become a real brain center."

"Sort of a 'mother ship away from home'," Donovan cracked, and Martin nodded. "But if nothing is in the works why did you want to see me?"

"They've brought in a new youth recruiter to head a new Visitor Youth program based in the library, a human collaborator. He was recruited from the Boston alliance, before they destroyed the city."

Donovan shook his head in disgust. "Great. So now they can 're educate' the kids right at headquarters, and the ones who don't 'learn' fast enough can be hustled out the back door and into the meat wagons."

Martin answered with a grim nod. "Pretty much. The program is in the early planning stages. But that's not the reason I needed to see you right now. We've found a connection between this collaborator and one of your people."

Infiltrators were always a possibility, but Donovan never could get over being outraged when one was outed. "Okay, who's the guy. I'll take the worse news after." Meaning, who the infiltrator was.

Pulling a small envelope out of his windbreaker, Martin withdrew from it a photo of a handsome fifty-something looking man, grey hair and moustache, steel rimmed glasses. What women might call "distinguished" back in the normal days. "David Peterson," Martin explained. "He was a professor in the Boston University School of Education. Multiple high-level degrees and credentials. He was on the inside of the planning for the 'regeneration' of the city, and spent a lot of time in the city's main library coordinating file transfers from key areas. History, philosophy…"

"Human culture and society," Donovan cut in.

"Yes, all the essentials necessary to a successful occupation. Military, and social. Apparently he managed to do it without the knowledge of the library management."

"Well he's not one of ours," Donovan noted with relief and handed the photo back to Martin. "Maybe he's into a another camp."

"No Donovan, he's not the infiltrator." Martin pulled out three more photos. "This woman was often seen with him, in fact he spent a great deal of time at her apartment. He was there the day of the final sweep, but left to meet his superiors before that neighborhood was razed."

Donovan looked at the photos, and looked again, wishing it was one of those foolish grainy surveillance images the government was so famous for, but of course even the Fifth Column possessed advanced Visitor technology. The first of the three photos showed the man from the first photo sitting in a coffee shop with a woman some years younger than himself. They obviously knew each other, probably intimately judging from the way they were sitting. The woman's face was mostly visible, but…

"She looks like a million others, Martin." No response, so he looked at the next photo. Exiting the same coffee shop, again the woman only half-turned to the camera. "Same thing, half a face." He knew, though, Donovan knew, and it was _not _a welcome surprise. In the third photo the couple was walking up the street, side by side, facing the camera. No obstructions. No mistake.

Donovan tore his eyes from the photo. "Angie Harper. Her name is Angie Harper. She came in with Ham Tyler and Chris Farber when we were still in the water processing plant. The night we had to beat it out of there, in fact." He answered Martin's raised eyebrows with, "No way they had anything to do with that. They've been getting us ammo, supplies, Tyler was off to Mexico for a couple months setting up new cells."

"And what does Angie Harper do for you?"

"Maggie Blodgett," Donovan knew that Martin knew who Maggie was, "she used her connection to that Daniel jerk to get Angie in on something similar with a Visitor. Got her a job at the library a couple months ago, low level. She's been working with Willie to figure out their computer systems."

"Has she found anything out that's been useful?" Martin asked.

"Not yet. She was just transferred to the biophysics division so we're hoping for more." He didn't like the look on Martin's face. "She figured out a way to manufacture all the passes we need, no more smash-and-grabs for forgeries." _Hell, I sound like a lawyer._

Martin stood silent, then observed, "Donovan you're not talking like someone who's leading a rebellion."

"Come _on_ Martin! She's been sleeping with a goddamn lizard to stay inside the operation!" He realized his slip, and added with an apologetic expression, "She's got as much invested as any of us. And besides, by now even you know Tyler. He's no hero, but he's for real. He wouldn't hook up with a collaborator. He's never been _that_ anxious to get laid."

"Assuming he knew who she was." It wasn't that he didn't understand, but Martin was becoming concerned that Donovan may not be seeing things clearly. He handed the envelope to Mike. "Look, we could be all wrong. Maybe it's a coincidence, or maybe it's not and she just changed her mind since she got together with Ham Tyler. But are you really willing to risk not finding out? We have too many lives depending on this. Maybe you're willing to take that chance, Mike, but,"

"All _right_," Donovan snapped testily. "You don't have to lecture me on the basics of resistance, Martin. I know how much you have at stake. We all have our lives on the line, and way more than just our own. I'll find out what's going on with this, and I'll let you know."

"Please, don't take too long. We don't expect that Youth Program to take more than a week or two to set up. We made our choices, Donovan. The targets of this program won't have that chance."

"Like I said, Martin..." Donovan throttled back his annoyance. Everything Martin said made perfect sense.

"I know, Mike. Good luck. And I hope I'm wrong."

They agreed on where to meet next, and parted. Martin left first, and then Donovan, by separate exits.

* * *

"Tyler, I need to talk to you."

He'd just finished working with Elias and Chris to sort and stack the explosives, Visitor uniforms, and voice synthesizers they'd spent most of the day chasing after. Every meet point was compromised; it had turned into a fucking scavenger hunt. This stuff here, that stuff there, and they barely got away from the uniform pickup ahead of a lizard patrol. It was almost midnight and Tyler was tired, filthy, and _not_ in the mood for a chat with Gooder. He spared a glance at Donovan before brushing past him to leave the storage room.

"I'm going to get a shower and fall on my face, in that order. Catch up with me tomorrow."

Donovan caught up with Tyler outside, and grabbed his arm. The latter turned on his heel with a look that would usually persuade Donovan to withdraw. When it didn't, Tyler asked, "Okay, what the hell is so important that it can't wait?"

"Not here. This has to be just us."

As Donovan led him down the stairs to the beach Tyler commented, "Well gee, Gooder, I usually get dinner and dancing first, but if you're that hot to trot..." When they'd reached the sand the look on Donovan's face as he turned to him gave Tyler serious pause. "Okay, so I can tell by your face it's important."

"Did Angie ever tell you about some college professor named Peterson? Somebody she knew back in Boston? Somebody she knew _well_?"

It took a minute to sink into Tyler's wiped-out brain. "She mentioned a college professor, but no Peterson... why don't you just ask her?" Donovan's silence spoke volumes, and Tyler's voice took on an edge. "Look Gooder, if you got something to say spit it out, will you? It's late and I am _not_ in the mood for word games." When Donovan handed him the photos, along with a small flashlight, Tyler barely glanced at them. "What's your point? That she screwed some egghead in Boston? What the hell do I care? I've done things that would stand her hair on end. Big deal."

"I had a meet tonight with Martin."

A dismissive smile, "Your lizard buddy. He give you these?" He gestured with the photos. "New hobby?"

There was no careful way of saying it, so Donovan plunged in. "The Fifth Column was active in Boston before it got blown up. It took a while for these to get here. This guy, Peterson," he pointed to the top photo, the solo one of Peterson, "he was a collaborator. Helped get things set for the Visitor takeover, organized data transfers from the library 'under the radar' so to speak. He got out just before it all went up, and the Visitors have brought him in here, to lead a new kind of Youth Program set up in the L.A. central library. Martin says it's been transformed into a sort of earth-based mothership. Recruitment, re-education, and if they don't cooperate the kids will be shipped off for 'processing'."

It was beginning to fall into place, and Donovan could see Tyler's face slam shut.

"You wanna know something, you ask her, not me."

"We will, tomorrow at the briefing." Tyler started to stride away but Donovan cut him off. "Look, Tyler, this all looks really shady but it's only looks. We both know how insubstantial pictures are... but I thought I'd ask you if she ever mentioned this guy. Like you say, who cares who she was hooked up with, but if she never told you... it could mean something."

Tyler stared for a minute. He didn't like this kind of game. "She mentioned a professor named David. Married, two kids, spent lots of time at the library and she fell for the brainpower and didn't care about the wedding ring. Left him at her place the day she left Boston."

"Right ahead of the big bang," Donovan noted. He didn't step back as Donovan got in his face. "How much do you really _know_ about Angie Harper?"

"As much as I need to. I know she's given up more of herself for this," he waved a hand up toward the compound, "than you have on your baddest-ass day."

Donovan gestured helplessly. "Come on, you know how this works. We have to be able to trust everybody, and with Peterson working for the Visitors, and Angie working in the same place, these," he took the photos back, "raise some questions that have to be answered."

Suddenly the look on Donovan's face made Tyler think of what his own must have looked like, when he told Donovan his kid had been turned by the lizards.

"For you, maybe." He turned to climb the stairs and raised a hand to head off what he knew was coming next. "_Don't_ have to tell me, Gooder. I'll keep your surprise party a secret." When they got to the main compound Tyler stood still for a moment and fixed Donovan with a hard stare. "Of course if you think I _won't,_ I can always bunk in the men's barracks. Because I know how this works, right?"

"For christsake Tyler do you think I'm enjoying this?" Donovan exploded, "I was supposed to go straight to Julie and Maxwell with this stuff... and by the way this conversation_ never happened_."

Tyler almost smiled. "Keepin' secrets Gooder? Didn't know you had it in you."

"Just be there at 10am tomorrow."

* * *

Tyler almost dozed off in the shower. _Now that would be a pretty sight to find in the morning_ he thought as dumped his filthy clothes in the big plastic bin by the door. He had no idea who tended to such mundane things as laundry. Stuff got dumped dirty and magically reappeared clean. It might have reminded him of when he was a kid at home, if he remembered back that far. Figuring it was late (almost 1am) and nobody much would be around he wrapped a towel around his waist and headed to the quarters he shared with Angie. He could almost feel the mattress under him... the bigger-than-cot-sized bed that Elias had scrounged for him. "I'm tired of having to fight to keep from falling out," he'd told Elias. "Find me something that two grownups can sleep in without inflicting casualties." The full-size set that Elias had come back with (still wearing its factory wrapper) was just right. Well it would have been, if Angie wasn't such a goddamned bed hog. If Tyler so much as got up for a piss in the night he'd return to find her sprawled out in the "Swastika maneuver"... covering every corner with some body part. Well tonight -- that is, this morning -- he'd by god nosedive on top of whatever was there, mattress or Angie, and leave the infirmary to sort it out in the morning.

Halfway up the hall a nearly-naked Tyler was surprised to cross paths with one of the pseudo-medical staff that Parrish had been training. A petite, busty brunette, who knew what her name was, _just get out of my way..._

"My, Mr. Tyler, off to a formal gathering?"

Shit. Now he remembered. Ruthie, that was her name, and she'd been working her way through most of the men in the compound who had more dick than sense, most likely spreading the clap and god knew what else in her wake. More people than him had suggested she be booted out before she caused a world of trouble, but Parrish thought "she should be given a chance." _A chance to what? Organize the Resistance's first gang bang? __Hell, if she were a man she'd be long gone by now._

He interrupted his inner rant to grumble, "Yeah. Senior prom, and I'm late." He meant to pass her but she stepped in front of him, and he wasn't about to physically collide with this horny bitch dressed -- or undressed -- as he was. She'd probably have a fistful of his balls if he gave her half a chance.

"I heard you had quite a day... lots of running and chasing and grabbing," Ruthie purred. "I'll bet after a day like that you could use some company, work off the adrenalin?"

Christ, how puke-inducingly trashy could a grown woman get? _I'd cut my cock off with a blunt knife before I'd let you get near it, sister. _Instead of blowing her off, he had just enough energy left to play.

"You sound like a woman who knows what a man wants," he gifted her with his well-practiced, wickedly suggestive smile. "And you're right, I could use some company. In fact, no sense dancing around it, I could _really_ use a _woman's_ company, know what I mean?"

She was practically leaning on him. "I thought you might. Guys like you, you need a woman who can keep up with you... who can understand what you need..."

_Shit, lady, which five-dollar whorehouse did you escape from? _Tyler leaned an arm against the wall, one hand holding the precariously fastened towel in place, and let his grin slide from ear to ear.

"Right again. And right here, right now, I need a woman who," he waited for her to lean even closer, as if she were going to hear the secret of the universe,

"A woman who... what?" Ruthie echoed, her voice husky.

"After a day like this... I need a woman," his mouth was almost, but not quite, touching her ear, "who won't give a shit that getting laid is the _last_ thing on my mind tonight, and she's sleeping right up the hall." Tyler straightened to take in Ruthie's stunned expression and added, "No sale, get it? Spread 'em somewhere else." He brushed past her and kept walking, smiling to himself as he heard her call after him in an after-midnight sort of stage whisper:

"Yeah, well I heard you're queer anyway. Not interested in women, except that wimpy geek you brought here, and I bet you don't even do it with her! Faggot."

By this time Tyler had reached his door, and turned around. He sneered as he whipped open his towel, "Take a good look, it's as close as you're gonna get."

"Fuck you, Tyler!" Ruthie stormed away but not before Tyler got the last word.

"Not even in the afterlife."

He was still laughing quietly to himself as he closed the door behind him.


	10. Matters of Knowledge

_1:45 am_

So beat he'd almost passed out standing up in the shower, Tyler found himself, inexplicably, not quite ready to sleep. He sat in the chair by the window that was open just enough to let the breeze off the beach cool the room and fill it with the smell of the sea. The window was left open at all times, even if just a crack, more for the second reason than the first. He didn't care much for it himself, but knew Angie still had that need to connect to something from the life she had before the world went to hell. She'd barely mentioned it when he first came back, but he'd known as soon as he arrived that the location of this compound would provide a little comfort for her that nothing and nobody else could.

_How much do you really know about Angie Harper_?

He'd given Gooder the short sharp answer, not bothering to tell him it wasn't the right question. What Donovan wanted to know was what he'd _learned_ about her. What he _knew_ was a different thing altogether.

What you learn about people is what they've done. What you _know _is who they are. Knowledge doesn't come from questions and answers. It comes from watching and listening and being with a person and -- props to Gooder -- relying on it exclusively is tantamount to suicide in the wrong circumstances. For reasons Tyler would never be able to explain, as far as Angie Harper was concerned knowing came easier than learning. Okay, by-the-book it would have been a lot smarter to _learn_ more about her before they got this far in with the Resistance, and... whatever. Knowledge had happened instead, and it made him more certain of her than learning could have done.

But the question _within_ the question Gooder had asked, by-the-book, "can we trust her"… Tyler was too good at what he'd been doing for so long (_I know how this works_) to consider offering his knowledge of Angie Harper as any kind of proof. So they'd have their meeting and present their pictures and their questions in the morning, and he had not even -- what was it those pansy-ass lawyers called it? a "scintilla of doubt"? -- he wouldn't have even a "scintilla of doubt" that Donovan, Parrish, and Maxwell, and whoever else would be sitting in judgment, would learn in the end what Tyler already knew: it was no more likely Angie Harper would sell out her new found comrades than she'd peel off her skin (_I know her skin_) and turn lizard.

_How much do you really know about Angie Harper…_

He turned his attention to the bed where, as usual, only the very top of her head was visible.

_Well I know that she burrows into bed like a groundhog._

He shivered as the breeze through the window raised goosebumps on his skin, but restrained himself from closing it.

_I know that she's convinced she'll suffocate if the damn window isn't open._

He knew other things, too.

_I know that she wants what's between us and wishes she didn't… _

_I know that she can't stop trying to make sense of everything that will never make sense…_

_I know that she knows__ me__ even better than my wife did and it scares the hell out of me (and she knows that too)… _

_I know that she's stronger than she thinks and weaker than she wants to be and hates being proud of how well she's learning to survive…_

_I know that coming back here from nights with that lizard is harder for her than going because she thinks she's coming back dirty... and that she'll never believe she's not… _

_I know that when she's hanging by a thread and says 'leave me alone' the 'don't' is silent…_

_I know that she needs promises that __nobody__ can keep in this fucked up New World... _

_I know that she deserves more, and that I deserve less, and that if she weren't around I'd never know a moment's quiet _

Going too deep triggered Tyler's inner defenses.

"And I know I'm deranged from sleep deprivation," he muttered aloud to himself, as if a stranger had tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out where his mind had been wandering. He noticed a stirring of the top of the head burrowed into the bedclothes.

"Mmmf, Tyler," Angie's muffled voice struggled toward clarity as she poked her head out and regarded him with confusion. There was just enough light from the quarter moon to reveal him slouched in the chair by the window, wearing nothing but a towel and a thoughtful expression, with no other clothing in evidence. "Poker game with Elias?"

He'd almost forgotten about his "casual" attire. "Nope. Ran into Ruthie."

Angie yawned, made a face. "I thought she was just undressing you with her _eyes_."

He laughed quietly and dropped the towel on his way to sit on the edge of the bed. "I managed to escape with my virtue intact," he assured Angie with a wry grin.

"_Virtue_?" she flopped back in bed, her laugh overcome by another yawn, "Who knew the bitch had a WayBack machine."

"Cute… shove over," he growled as he slid into bed, "I'm freezing my nuts off."

Angie frowned up at him, eyes open and expression serious. "It's really okay if you close the window…"

Her earnestness drew a smile from him and he rose on an elbow to lean over her, traced a fingertip along her forehead and down her cheek, and back up again. "Leave it open, Angel. That's just me bitching after a long day." He felt the soft skin furrow under his finger.

"Got all your stuff today, everybody back in one piece?"

"Yeah. And then some." He could tell she was reading him; somewhere along the way he'd lost the ability to fake her out.

Angie tapped the scar on his left temple. "So what's winding you up in there?"

"Nothing. Go back to sleep." He lay down on his side and draped an arm over her.

_Liar, liar pants on fire…_ she decided to leave it alone. Maybe it was nothing, or not, but she was too sleepy to find out.

"Yeah," she sighed, "gotta have my wits about me for another goddamn Saturday morning meeting."

"You'll be fine."

_I'll be fine?? _Angie was about to call him on that when he surprised her by wrapping closely around her, like he did after the nightmares she hadn't had since before he left for Mexico. Like he did when things were crashing down on her. But that wasn't happening now… was it?

Angie pried her head from Tyler's shoulder and ran a couple of fingers down his bearded cheek, looking him hard in the eye. "Tyler, you're acting _weird_."

"Well as you observed before I went to Mexico, you're stuck with it. Now for christsake, _go to sleep, _will you?" Raised eyebrows, stern expression.

When she lay her head down again, silent, his deep breath and explosive exhale told her what she already knew… something was simmering inside.

* * *

"We've never come up against this kind of thing before."

Mike woke Julie to show her Martin's photos, which immediately changed the following morning's agenda.

"I guess we show them to her," Donovan reasoned, "and ask her what she knew about this guy. It could be nothing. She wouldn't be the first to have been in on only half of some guy's double life."

Julie was obviously upset by this new information. "But no matter what she tells us, we can't corroborate it. There's nobody left from her Boston days that we know of, _except_ this David Peterson. So if she tells us she didn't know a thing, how are we going to know it's the truth?"

Mike had decided not to tell her he'd questioned Tyler about this mess. "Well she's been here a while. If she really was a collaborator, don't you think she'd have had the Visitors down on us by now?"

"Maybe. Unless she was looking for more about the wider Resistance."

Donovan shook his head, gestured around them. "From here? Come on... she knows by now we don't have those kind of connections."

"But Tyler does." Julie frowned. Tyler had only recently returned from helping set up a new network in Mexico. "Maybe this has less to do with us than him."

This stopped Mike in mid-debate. "You mean she might have hooked up with him knowing he was coming here?"

"Or maybe she was just hitching a ride west and lucked out."

"Pretty extreme luck, if you ask me. I dunno, Tyler was never one to be turned by a damsel in distress. He's never been fooled before, but I guess we can all burn out after awhile. What I don't get is if this is what it looks like, why she didn't just stick with Peterson instead of going to all this trouble to come here, chance being accepted, and all the rest."

The frown deepened. "Well if she's infiltrated us and is reporting to the Visitors instead of the other way around... it makes perfect sense." Julie's expression changed from disappointment to uncertainty. The kind of uncertainty she'd shown in the very beginning.

"Mike, what if we're right?"

He shrugged grimly. "Well we'll deal with it when it happens."

"No, I mean if we're right and Angie is a collaborator..." clearly Julie would rather not consider the possibility, "she can't keep on like she has. But we can't let her go, either. What do we _do_ with her if we find out she's a spy?"

By now they'd all grown accustomed to the risks associated with the rebellion. Friends and comrades had been lost; placing their own lives at risk had become a given. But the other practical aspects of running a revolution... they'd always been strictly a hit-and-run outfit, and had never had to deal with prisoners. Collaborators had been discovered, but always after the fact. What would they do, what _could_ they do, with a traitor who remained in their midst?

"Ordinarily I'd say Tyler would be the expert on that kind of thing."

Ignoring the last statement as best she could, Julie suggested wearily, "Let's get together with Robert tomorrow, nine o'clock. That should give us at least some time before the meeting to talk about this. Do you think we should tell Tyler and Chris not to come?"

"We have to treat this like we would anyone else, either way," Donovan said firmly. "You know how it would look if we told Tyler to stay away... even if we could keep him out." He knew that much was true, whether or not he'd told Tyler about the whole thing earlier.

"I guess you're right," Julie nodded. "Okay, I'll grab Robert tomorrow in time for nine." Instead of returning to her room Julie headed off in the direction of the kitchen. "I don't know about you, but I'm not going to get any sleep tonight. I'm making a pot of coffee, if you're interested." Her look said _please, Mike, be interested, I can't do this alone._

"Count me in."

As they walked down the corridor Donovan draped an arm around Julie, and she gratefully grabbed onto his hand. She'd thought all of her ugly initiations into this goddamned New World were behind her. What a joke, she thought, but was too sick with trepidation to laugh.


	11. Matters of learning

"Okay, what's on the menu today?" Angie slouched into her chair, coffee in hand. It took a few seconds of silence before the grim expressions on the faces of Julie, Donovan, and Robert sank in. Tyler's face was blank, absolutely devoid of expression. Chris Farber was absent, busy with working with Elias on a complete inventory of their weapons and other related supplies to account for the new stuff brought in the night before.

Julie and Robert exchanged looks then Robert asked, "Angie, what do you know about David Peterson?"

Hearing his full name was a shock. "David Peterson?" She cut a not-too-subtle look at Tyler, whose face remained frozen in place. She'd never mentioned David except for that time at the cabin, and never his last name. "I knew him back in Boston. Why?"

Instead of answering Robert spread three photographs on the table. "Is this him?"

God... she never imagined she'd see his face again. Angie gulped back a gasp. "That's him," she managed to reply. Then the shock evaporated as she looked at the other two photos of her and David inside the Au Bon Pain on Boylston Street and walking up the sidewalk outside. "Where did you get these?"

They ignored the question. "How did you meet?" Robert wanted to know.

She began to answer by reflex, "He was a BU professor, came in the library a lot... where did you _get_ these?" she repeated.

"Angie how close were you and David Peterson? How much did you know about him and what he did at the library?"

Angie looked from one solemn face to the other. Tyler was staring at the table, or the photos, she couldn't tell. His face was a closed door, his eyes gone one-way again.

"Look," she snapped, "I don't know what's going on here but I'd like to know why the hell you think my private life, my _past_ private life, is any of your business. _And where the hell did you_ _get_ _these_??" She picked the photos up and flung them down again.

"My contact Martin from the Visitor Fifth Column gave them to me. And it's our business because they came from Fifth Column surveillance that was going on in Boston before the Visitors 'regenerated' it," Donovan explained. Then, figuring the best way to gauge Angie's response was to spring it on her suddenly, he added, "Peterson was collaborating with the Visitors on the takeover. He was transferring files from the library's computers, local information, maps, helping them locate where any Resistance might be meeting." Well it worked. Angie looked like he'd just slapped her upside the head, and hard.

"Bullshit. He never... I mean, he never _told_ me about anything like that."

"You mean he never asked for any passwords, no questions about the computers, nothing?" Robert sounded disbelieving.

Angie felt like she was drowning. She began to speak almost automatically. "Look, he came in a lot. I spent mornings in the computer room, afternoons in circulation. He had academic privileges in the computer room, didn't need any special passwords and it was quicker and easier for professors to get stuff they needed for research and all. We got to know each other..." She trailed off.

"Did he ever talk about the Visitors? His sympathies about that kind of thing?" Julie asked. Angie glared at her, at all of them.

"We didn't get into politics. History, literature, music, philiosophy -- ancient stuff, nothing more recent than 19th century I guess, we shared an interest in Zola, and Dickens." Okay, she knew what they were after. "We had an affair. He was married, two kids, they lived in another part of the city. He stayed at my place alot, he'd call his wife and say he was staying at his office on campus because of the extra research he was doing." She headed off the obvious question. "No, I don't know what it was. He said he was writing a book, but didn't want to talk about it while it was 'in process'." She was amazed at the lost details that were returning.

"You expect us to believe that with the Visitors taking over the whole city, you never talked politics?" Robert demanded, "Did you know anybody in the Resistance?"

Angie squirmed. "Yeah, actually. And no, I didn't join up. I don't know, it just seemed so far away... or maybe it was that with everything seeming to go to hell it was easy to make believe that only literature and philosophy and history was real, as long as there was someone who was willing to make it seem real." It was something she had never come to terms with, not really. "And no, David never asked me about my friends, either." Why would he? If what they were saying was true, the information he was finding every day was helping him help the Visitors eliminate them. No... it couldn't be true.

"He was an academe, for christsake, I find it hard to believe he could get all worked up into helping invaders destroy the city he lived in! He never _talked_ about that stuff. Neither one of us did. I didn't know what he did when we weren't together."

"You knew he was married," Julie prodded, and Angie nodded silently. "And you weren't moved to ask any questions at all?" She tried to keep the judgment from her voice; there was enough to be concerned about here without getting tangled in questions of personal morality. When she got no response Julie decided to try a less confrontational approach. "Did he ever say _anything_ that might have sounded odd to you? Anything that indicated any involvement at all in the events outside of your personal time together?"

Angie was about to offer another "none of your business" when at long last Tyler spoke up. "Now that you know your friend was involved in something that got your friends killed, anything he said might sound a little different." _Just suck it up and answer the questions, Angel, and you can deal with the personal fallout later._

Those chocolate eyes were boring into her. Had he known about this last night? _Wait. Now's not the time. Be still. Breathe..._

She kept her eyes locked on Tyler as she spoke. "I remember something, just one time, the week of their final strike. People had been going missing, including some of my friends I knew were in the Resistance, and the Visitors stopped being casual about their interest in the library records. I was transferred from IT and put in circulation full time, but my access to the member records had new passwords that told me they had an eye on everything I and my colleagues did."

"No more Elmer Fudd," Tyler said with a straight face. _Tell them, at least tell them what you told me. _The others looked at him like he was crazy.

"For christsake, Tyler, you think this is a game?" Donovan demanded. Tyler's only response was to beam his raised-eyebrow stare at Angie. _Well?_

"I used to change some of the names in the member records, the card holders. Not my friends, they let their cards lapse when they got active in the Resistance, but there were others who weren't all that shrewd and were doing a lot of reading up on fascism, totalitarianism, histories that gave an indication of the warning signs, and how books about rebellions. The stuff that any invader would keep a sharp eye on. I messed with the names of the people who checked them out... made up names, cartoon names I figured the Visitors wouldn't know about... Elmer Fudd was one I used a lot." Donovan, Julie and Robert looked at one another.

"I thought you said you weren't involved in any of it," Donovan observed, "that sounds pretty involved to me."

"Yeah, well involved is a relative term. Not so involved I couldn't walk away when others were rounded up." _Focus... breathe..._ "Anyway," Angie continued after gulping a breath, "one of the last times David and I were out in public, maybe it was the day those were taken," she indicated the photos scattered on the table, "I told him I was getting scared, I wondered what would happen if they came after anyone in IT, because we all knew what happened to people who were 'questioned'." Tyler was right, the more time went by the more odd his response seemed, even if she hadn't been told everything she'd just heard now. Before anyone could ask she told them, "He said there was nothing to worry about. Only the people who broke the law were getting arrested. I wanted to ask him how he could be so sure, because I could tell he _was_ sure."

Julie prodded, "But you didn't ask him."

"No."

Julie and Robert exchanged another look. _I feel like I'm digging my own grave,_ Angie thought to herself.

Just then Robert asked, "When was the last time you saw David Peterson?"

"The morning I left, he was at my apartment. Things were shutting down all over the city, but I thought I still had a job to go to. I was late, though, about 45 minutes. I'd tried to call in but the lines were all busy. David was at the kitchen table," finally the image of of what must have followed caught up with her, and she choked for a minute. "he said he was gonna jump in the shower and would call me the next day or so. I drove to work, about five miles. The traffic was really weird, streets blocked off, and when I got closer to the library I could see it was cordoned off, there were those Visitor jeep things parked all around. So I u-turned it back to my place to warn David that something was happening and it was probably big." At this point Angie paused. She was remembering way too many things she'd worked way too hard to put out of her head since coming to L.A. Not having to answer questions, because Tyler and Farber hadn't asked any, had made it easier.

"And?" Tyler asked with evident impatience. _Get it over with, fill them in and shut them up and we can all get on with business._

Of course Angie couldn't read through his closed expression, a look she hadn't seen since the first week they met.

"And I saw the smoke from half a mile away..." she trailed off. "I got maybe within a couple streets of my place, but the whole block and the one between was in flames. No firetrucks, no rescue, just fire and smoke. No people. No nothing. Just fire, and smoke, and the smell..." Her voice was becoming ragged. _Don't make me do this, it was almost over, why are you making me do this? _She sucked in another breath. "I tanked up on the edge of the city and drove west until I ran out of gas, I have no idea where I was.. Or the radiator blew, or something. I don't remember. I fell asleep, or passed out, and I woke up to uzis and disruptors and somebody yelling at me to get the fuck out of the car with my hands up." She nodded toward Tyler. "That would be him."

"Were the Visitors already there when you got there? Or were they following you?" Donovan asked Tyler.

"They came at us over a ridge, out of nowhere, which is where we were. Middle of nowhere. We didn't even notice that little shitbox of hers until after the smoke settled."

"So Angie, you got out of Boston just ahead of the destruction. Your car broke down in the middle of nowhere, right where a Visitor ambush caught up with two notorious" -- Tyler smirked at that -- "international special operations operatives, who were headed to L.A. to hook up with the Resistance." Robert was speaking slowly, as if trying to cover things step by step. "And you hitched a ride with two fully armed strangers."

This was beginning to wear on Angie. Questions and questions, and it was all in the past! What was the point, except to make her feel like she'd committed a crime? "I didn't have a whole lot of options. No car, no water, nothing. And even _I_ knew the Visitors have locating devices in their vehicles. It wouldn't be long before more of them came along." Everyone was waiting, looking at each other, except for Tyler who had closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again to look at nobody in particular.

"Look, I'm telling you the truth. I had no idea what if anything David was up to. If you want to think of me as some witless cowardly bimbo screwing a married man and not caring about anything else, go ahead. _It's all I know about it_. I don't get what it matters now. He's dead, along with everyone else."

"David Peterson was just brought into the L.A. central library to coordinate a new expansion of the Youth Corps Program," Tyler told her in a quiet voice. "He might have been at that apartment the morning you left, but he's no more dead than you are."

"Which raises an interesting point," Robert suggested, "two people who were 'close' in Boston get out just under the wire and wind up in the same library in L.A. One is continuing his open collaboration with the Visitors and the other... hitched a ride with two key strategy and munitions experts and is embedded with the Resistance and reporting to that same library every day."

Angie felt like the breath had been punched out of her. "What are you... what do you mean he's alive? How could he be _alive_! How could he have known when they were going to pull the trigger?" She felt a combination of nausea and shock threaten to overtake her.

"How could he have known there was 'nothing to worry about'?" Julie inquired mildly.

Angie gaped at them. "What the hell does 'embedded' mean? You think I came here on purpose, that I'm working for _them_??" She turned a near-panicked face to Tyler. "You think I used him, both of them... that I hooked up with them because of who they were and where they were going..." she shook her head frantically, her voice rising, "I'd be _dead_ without Tyler and Chris! They _helped _me, I had no idea who they were, I had no idea who _you_ were..." she pushed her chair back from the table. "You think I'm a spy, I can't believe I didn't get it." She felt herself spinning out of control. "David is _alive_? Why didn't he warn me, why didn't he..." she lowered her head for a moment, pressed her hands to her temples, then looked up in horror. "I don't know what happened, I don't _know_..."

Tyler had been taking the whole thing in, waiting patiently for the stupidity of their suspicions to become evident to everyone. He hadn't expected to hear about a scenario where he and Farber may have been the dupes of a Visitor plant. His eyes narrowed; he looked from his colleagues to Angie, who was on the brink of coming apart.

"Nobody's accusing you of anything," Robert told Tyler (rather unwisely, Donovan was thinking), "it all fits with an infiltrator scenario. She and her lover part company, one stays inside the Visitor network and one ingratiates herself with someone who it's obvious would become key to the Resistance, and delivers what she learns to her contact under the guise of helping us..."

Suddenly Angie slammed to her feet, causing Donovan, Julie, and Robert to jump in their seats.

_"Shut up!"_ she screamed at them, "Do you have _any idea_ what happens to me when I go out with Maggie? Do you have any idea what he _does _to me?"

Abruptly Tyler slid his chair back. "I'm done here," he announced through clenched teeth, and left.

Angie stared after him then turned on the others. "I'm _sorry_ Ruby died! What I did I did to help, I came here with no idea who I was anymore or where I belonged, and I finally figured out who and where and what I could do to maybe make it up to my friends... and now you tell me that I was having an affair with someone who was helping my friends get _killed_... and you tell me I'm _using _someone who saved me from dying alone, from going crazy, who ..." she didn't care anymore how they'd take what she was saying. She backed up against the wall, suddenly terrified. "You think I'm a spy, you'll make Tyler think I'm a spy. You'll throw me out... no. You can't let me go, then, can you?"

Somewhere in the chaos of Angie's reaction Julie recognized the horror of dawning recognition. It wasn't the reaction of a turncoat discovered, it was the reaction of someone who'd been forced to confront her own betrayal at the hands of someone she trusted. She cut a look at Donovan, who looked supremely uncomfortable. Even Robert's edge seemed to have been dulled by Angie's outburst. It was Donovan that spoke first.

"Take it easy, I don't think any of us is up to organizing a firing squad." He looked quickly at the others. "I think you've told us everything you know, but we have to figure out what to do with it. You have to know how bad all of this looks." Her blank expression told him he was wrong. "Or maybe you didn't until now. But we need to talk things over and figure some stuff out."

"So, do you lock me up somewhere until you decide what to do with me?" Angie wasn't kidding even a little bit.

"I don't think that's necessary," Robert admitted. He looked almost sympathetic, where before he'd been verging on Grand Inquisitor. "Just go back to your quarters and we'll let you know what's going on. Are you and Maggie going out tonight?" Nobody liked to call it what it was, and both Angie and Maggie were oddly grateful for that.

"No. I told him I had other plans this weekend. I think Maggie is meeting Daniel though." She paused, looked at the floor for a minute, then up again. "She said he mentioned something new happening in the Visitor Youth Corps." In a smaller voice she added, "Maybe that's David. Maybe he'll tell her what Martin told Donovan." Angie looked closely at the people who had almost seemed to be her friends, for a while anyway. "I didn't _know_. There's no way to prove it, not the way you mean. But I didn't _do_ the things you said, and Chris and Tyler..." she looked hard at Julie, "no. If you really knew me you'd know I didn't do any of those things."

"And Tyler really knows you," Donovan commented.

"Yeah. Yeah he does. Maybe the only one."

"Why is that?"

"Because he wants to."

Silence for a long moment.

"We're done here for now," Julie nodded to the others.

_"I'm done here_," _he said_. _What's he thinking now, what does he believe?_

Angie rushed out the door and into the open ground between in the buildings in time to see Tyler striding toward the motor pool, bag in hand. She broke out at a dead run.

"_Tyler,"_ she cried out, then stumbled and fell to her knees in the dirt as it all came crashing down. "_TyLERRRRRR!!"_ She pounded her fists on her knees and hollered, "I didn't know! I didn't _know!_"

The last word was a scream of anguish. For her confusion and betrayal, and for what little she'd gained that could be so easily lost since her former life had disappeared in ashes .


	12. Reason, resolution, and repair

_Reason: Angie Harper and Ham Tyler's quarters_

As the unholy echo of her own voice died, Angie waited. She waited to see a shadow fall across her like it did that first day. She waited for a hand to reach down and drag her to her feet. When she raised her head and squinted in the sun, she saw he was gone.

_Focus. Be still. Be quiet. Breathe. What happens, happens. You deal with it._

She took a quick look around to see who might have witnessed her outburst. Nobody she could see, but she knew they were there, some of them, watching and wondering what was up. They'd know soon enough. Better not to give them anything else to wonder about. She fought a renewed wave of nausea at the realization that had been forced on her and got to her feet.

_Focus__, goddammit._ There was more at stake here than someone she didn't want to see walk away. There _had_ to be, because if there wasn't then everything she'd done that made her feel filthy, and might just eventually make her clean, didn't mean a thing. Isn't that what she'd thrown in Tyler's face that night when he was the only one she could trust to help her? He never let her down. Even if he'd heard more than he wanted to just now, and believed just that one wrong thing, at least he'd never lied to her.

She wanted to go back to Julie and Donovan and Robert, to take back her wild explosion, but she figured that would look desperate. This wasn't a time to look desperate. Even though she knew they were wrong she also knew that if she wanted them to believe her she had to come up with something worth believing in. Something that would cancel out three photographs and three people who had no choice but to doubt her.

She went to her quarters as they'd told her to do, and pulled out one of her notebooks. Computers were her thing, but computers were at a premium and had to be devoted to important, immediate things like running biological data. Brainstorming, whether in solitude or with others, had to rely on old-fashioned note taking. Angie sat at the table and stared out at the water for a few minutes, then began to write furiously. Numbers, bullet points, crossed out and refined. When she finally put down the pen the quiet in the room couldn't overcome the noise in her head. It was the wrong kind of quiet, an empty quiet.

She'd gotten up off her knees on her own, and come back here and reasoned some things down on paper on her own, things that could make a difference even now that all bets were off. She knew that was a good thing, but not good enough to keep her from reaching for the towel that hung on a nearby chair and pressing her face into it to breathe in the scent of gun oil and leather.

* * *

_Resolution: the kitchen/briefing room_

It was Donovan who broke the silence first. "I think it's possible these pictures might be worth less than a thousand words."

"I just wish we had more than her word to go on. It just all adds up to something different than what she said." Robert sounded less determined than in the beginning, but nobody could disagree.

"I wish we did too, but I think Mike is right," Julie offered. "Maybe everything that's happening has us adding more to what's there… maybe Tyler could share a little more of what he knows?"

Donovan snorted. "Yeah, and maybe Diana will march in here and surrender. Look like I told Julie last night, Tyler and his friend Farber aren't known for being too trusting and as long as I've known about them I have _never_ heard of them being taken in by an infiltrator. Especially not a woman posing as a computer geek."

Finally Robert agreed. "I'm no expert in interrogation, but when Tyler told Angie that Peterson was still alive… that didn't look like the face of someone caught in a lie."

Julie nodded. "I noticed it too, but I'm no expert either."

Donovan spoke up then. "None of us are. _Tyler's_ the expert, and something tells me he didn't walk out because he believed in Robert's scenario."

"I was wondering about that myself. It's not for me to figure out whatever's between the two of them; they keep that a very closed book."

"Well it ain't no romance novel. More like Ripley's Believe It Or Not," Donovan muttered under his breath.

Julie shot him a disapproving look and changed the subject. "I suggest we consider the issue settled. Mike, you should meet up with Martin again and tell him it was a false alarm."

Another matter remained to be discussed… the risk of David Peterson crossing paths with Angie at the library. Her sudden resignation was out of the question… as Donovan put it, "Nobody resigns from the Visitor payroll, they just get transferred to the menu." And her connection with Todd complicated things; none of them knew enough about Visitor customs to be sure he wouldn't go looking for her. Willie could be consulted on that score.

"Maybe it's time to cut this whole library thing short," Julie suggested. "In spite of all of Angie and Willie's work all we've learned is basically how much we _haven't_ learned."

"If only there was some way to get to the source," Robert mused, "just get the whole biophysics operation's project information and data in one swoop." Julie and Donovan stared at him. "Okay, okay, and maybe Diana will march in here and surrender. But something has to happen, even if it doesn't advance our biological research. That new Visitor Youth Program can't be allowed to get underway."

"Why don't we all take a day to think about it and get together tomorrow to consider whatever we come up with? Make sure Tyler and Chris are included, and Angie, Maggie and Willie. For now, someone should tell Angie she's in the clear."

"I'll do it," Donovan volunteered, gathering up the photos from the table. "After all, I'm the one who brought in exhibits a, b, and c."

* * *

_Repair: the motor pool_

Tyler finished reassembling the Harley's motor and gathered up the worn parts he'd replaced, dumping them in a nearby barrel. He emptied the dirty oil and discarded coolant into various containers (they'd be useful for other purposes), then cleaned off his tools and put them back in the tool bag. He stretched the kinks that had gathered in his back after being hunched over and crouched next to the bike for the past hour or so, wiped his hands as best he could on the rag hanging from his back pocket, and checked his watch. Enough time, he figured, one way or another. Enough time for Parrish, Donovan, and Maxwell to have decided that an admittedly bizarre set of coincidences were in fact just that, and not an indication of espionage and conspiracy. Enough time to determine that Ham Tyler hadn't been taken in by the wiles of a shrewd, Visitor-aligned temptress planted under the dashboard of a broken down shitbox in the middle of nowhere. He hoped so, anyway, because if they had the bad sense to think of questioning _him_ on what they suspected Angie might have asked him about that might have been remotely useful to the lizards… well, he supposed he could choke back the "none of your fucking business" long enough to tell them "Nothing." Which would, of course, be the truth. Angie wasn't inclined to discuss the details of rebellion or politics or anything else "intelligence-related" outside the confines of the rebel meetings. She was especially not inclined to discuss them when she was alone with him. Of course any questions directed to him from the Big 3 that might address those kinds of conversations… _that's_ where "none of your fucking business" would come in handy.

As for the scene after he'd walked out... it was better to leave things lying for a while. He'd heard her screaming his name (shit, they probably heard her on the Mother Ship) but he wasn't about to give anyone in the compound more of a show than they'd already seen. What was discussed and asked and answered in private would filter out among the general population soon enough, and it was for damn sure that the less professional of them (most of 'em, no matter how well they fought) would find it a cure for boredom and frustration. They'd already seen Angie screaming her lungs out that "she didn't know", and that kind of hysterical denial of guilt would be just what the uninitiated would expect from someone who's busted and guilty. Seeing them both together, and learning later it was just after the interrogation, would just get the trash talkers going on about who was getting whose stories straight, or who was applying a little extra "persuasion" to the distracted-by-hormones but otherwise influential Fixer… all manner of crap was possible. It was hard enough to herd these cats without a whole mess of social commentary and gossip getting them stirred up.

He hoped enough time had passed for Angie to get a grip on herself. He wasn't stupid, he knew the shit she'd just heard and what she'd had to talk about (that even he hadn't heard in detail before now) tore up some pretty deep wounds. It was written all over her, and was a major reason he'd gotten up and left. As much as he knew the doubts were unfounded Tyler also knew what the drill was in this situation… the questions have to be asked and answered. This was a war ("Resistance" sounded a lot nobler, but the same rules applied) and nothing could be left to trust. He had to admit he was impressed by how they'd handled it: short, sweet, and to the point. Do you now or have you ever, where and why and how. And Angie had done pretty well, up till the end anyway. She was a beginner, and had gotten blindsided and lost her focus. The worst thing that could happen was for her to start freaking out like an amateur spy who'd been caught and was scrambling for escape. Okay, it was possible the others, being beginners themselves, wouldn't read it that way. But he'd seen that kind of thing happen too often not to know that freaking out wasn't always read as a sign of outraged innocence.

So when he'd risked a glance, much against his better judgment, he'd caught Angie on her knees wearing the same look she'd had the day he and Farber first found her. Bewildered, terrified, and wondering what the fuck had happened. He remembered hearing a phrase once that described the looks on the faces of refugees of bombing in Cambodia… "buried in chaos." That's where she was now, and he knew what she thought she needed: for him to go to her where she was, to tend to the personal fallout that was burying her in chaos. She thought she needed hugs and kisses, that physical connection, to make it all better. The details of war rendered personal fallout irrelevant and right now it was those details that she had to stand up to on her own, like she'd learned to stand up to them while he was in Mexico. Anything else would weaken her in the long run, and weakness was fatal.

_You self-righteous liar… you know what you wanted to do. You wanted to go to her and pick her up off the ground and set the both of you on this bike and get the fuck outta Dodge. And when you'd dropped her at the cabin with a three-day supply of books and bubble bath and bunny rabbit jammies you'd come back and find that "Sometimes there's claws" skank lizard asshole and nail his hide to the nearest wall. If there wasn't a wall you'd build one, __then__ nail his hide to it. Then you'd find that species-traitor Daniel and do the same to him, for Maggie. Finally a quick phone call to the lizard library to give 'em an "anonymous tip" that their collaborator was feeding information to the Resistance, so David Fucking Peterson could then be eaten up for real the way learning the truth about him was eating up Angie inside. And then you'd turn your back on the whole mess and go back to the cabin and wait for all of them to blow each other the fuck up, and when the dust settled it would finally be well and truly quiet. Forever._

All at once Tyler found himself fighting the urge to race to the middle of the compound and bellow, _"HEY YOU AMATEUR ASSHOLES, I QUIT!!"_ as loud as he could.

Instead he tipped his head back, sucked in a deep breath, and blew it out in a harsh explosion. No surprise, it wasn't nearly as satisfying as usual. He checked his watch again. Hour and a half. That should be enough time.

There'd be hell to pay when he showed up in their quarters once she figured out he'd left her alone on purpose, screaming on her knees in the middle of her own hell. He didn't mind. It was good for her. He'd stand back and let her rage and cry but he _would_ stand back, either way, for now.

Later, once the details of war had been settled, he'd dig her out of the chaos with his bare hands.


	13. Exorcism and what is

When Donovan got to Angie's room (Angie and _Tyler's_ room, he corrected himself, hard as it was to fathom) he found the door wide open, and from where he stood he could see only the table by the window, a notebook sitting there with pages flapping back and forth in the breeze. He knocked on the doorjamb as he stuck his head in.

"Angie? Okay if I come in?"

She was sitting on the bed (how the hell did Elias score a full, almost queen-size bed?) reading. Angie's head jerked up at the sound of his knock, and Mike felt a stab of something like guilt. No reason to feel guilty, they had to use their heads, but he couldn't help thinking about how he'd feel sitting in a room waiting to hear what would become of him at the hands of people he thought knew him.

"Yeah, come in." Angie stood up and set her book down on the bed, and waited.

"Whatcha reading?" he couldn't help but ask, and took a step to lean over and get a closer look. Books were few and far between, if only because nobody had the time or inclination to bother with them, and everyone was more involved getting things like food and weapons and medical supplies, things that had to do with survival.

"Jerzy Kosinski," she showed him the cover. "Being There."

"Relating to being trapped in a world you didn't ask for?" Donovan asked.

"More like reinforcing the notion that putting too much faith in appearances can lead you astray. Tyler brought it back for me from Mexico…" she headed off his next question with, "Don't ask. I didn't." She took a breath and tossed the book back on the bed. "So. You didn't come to discuss literature."

"You're in the clear. Sure it looked a little funny, but looks aren't everything." He nodded toward the book.

At first faint with relief, Angie suddenly jumped to the table and snatched up her notebook and began talking a mile a minute.

"Look, I've been trying to figure out what to do next… obviously I can't just go back there, if David sees me it's all over. But I can't just quit. I'm wondering if there's something Robert and Julie can tip me onto, biology-wise, that I can get in and i.d. it and get out again, maybe say I've gotta leave because the mysterious ex is stalking me or something…" She hadn't really gotten any of it sorted out, but figured she had to start _somewhere_ if she wasn't going to lose momentum and wind up back where she'd started: just along for the ride.

Donovan stood silent under the onslaught of words. She was going like she'd been sucking down coffee all day. "Hey, Angie, slow down." She shut up, but looked a little upset that he wasn't all excited by her initiative. "Don't look so offended."

"But I thought I could get something else going…" she tried to explain more but he shushed her again.

"I know, but it's not your job. We're gonna get together tomorrow, all of us, you and Maggie and Julie and Robert, Tyler too, and see where we can go next. _All_ of us, understand?"

She dropped the notebook on the table, frowning. "Sorry, I didn't mean to step on anybody's authority. I just thought I could help."

"You _are _helping. What you and Maggie are doing, isn't that enough? You're," he paused, "you're doing things that nobody should have to do. Let somebody else do some heavy lifting too."

Angie shook her head and went to stare out the window. "I don't think you get it, but it's not important I guess." She was surprised when Mike walked over to stand close behind her.

"I do get it," he told her. "Because I'm crazy to finish it too, because I can't think of any other way to make it up to the people I lost, and I lost plenty, believe me. Anything I do that isn't ending this _now _feels like wasted effort. But it's not. And nothing I can do no matter how fast I can do it will change what's happened or undo anything I've already done." He stepped back as she turned to face him. She was as close to open as he figured he'd ever see and he felt like a fucking voyeur. What _was_ it about her and Tyler that made him feel like he was spying any time he saw the curtain part for even a second?

"I stand corrected. What Tyler said about Elmer Fudd, what I said about messing with names. It just feels so lame. My friends _died_ while I was screwing a collaborator. What can I possibly do that can make up for that?"

"What we all do, whatever we can." Now he smirked. "Christ, you pay enough dues for _all _of us just putting up with Tyler."

"He knew about this, didn't he." _That_ would explain his mood last night.

"Yeah, I went to him first with the pictures. I figured maybe he could tell me something that would give me a reason to throw them away then and there and not have to go through what happened this morning."

In spite of everything, Angie laughed out loud. "Brother, I can picture how _that_ went." She looked at Donovan, not for the first time, as a different creature than the simple pain in the ass she'd pegged him to be in the beginning, and the annoying hero-wannabe Tyler bitched about day and night. "So I guess you _don't_ think I'm just a mercenary's moll after all, do you?"

Donovan protested, "Hey, I never said that!"

"God, Tyler is right, you _are _kind of delicate, aren't you? Thanks anyway. And why don't we just let our little self-flagellation society be our secret."

"'Little'? It's a lot bigger than you think. Meeting time TBA for tomorrow. See ya later."

Donovan collided with Tyler as he turned up the corridor outside the door.

"Keepin' secrets is getting to be a habit of yours, Gooder…"

Donovan ignored the comment. "She's clear. We meet again tomorrow to figure out where this goes next, since she can't risk being seen by Peterson." Tyler's rolled-eyes response came as no surprise.

"Another goddamned meeting… let's just nuke the lizards and be done with it."

"We're working on it, we're working on it," Mike assured him before walking away.

Tyler paused next to the open door and took a breath, fighting the urge to protect his balls with his tool bag.

"Congratulations Angel, I hear the firing squad's been canceled."

She turned from the window where she'd been staring at the waves. No anger in her face, just a bit of surprise.

"You came back."

He took in her neutral expression, barely touched by a frown of puzzlement. "I never left." She just stood there staring at him, and at the black bag he held, as if she were wondering why he was there. It wasn't quite what he'd been bracing himself for.

"The bike needed a tune up," Tyler explained as he dropped the bag near the dresser. It made a racket as it hit the floor, and she kept staring at it like she'd been duped. He wasn't sure why but her mild "Huh?" demeanor abruptly pissed him off.

"For christsake, Angie," he exploded, "how stupid do you think I am? You really think I'd buy that crap about you playing Farber and me for information? And if I _was_ that stupid, you think I'd just walk without a word about it?"

"The way you stomped out and stalked off, what was I _supposed_ to think?"

_You weren't supposed to think, Angel, you were supposed to know__. _"I _left_ because if I opened my mouth again it would have been to tell them all to fuck off and grow a brain, and I don't think that would've helped, do you? Here," he fished in his pocket and pulled something out.

When she didn't respond he took her hand and put whatever he had into it, then closed it up again. She opened her hand and peered at what it held. A sparkplug. "What's this for?"

Tyler pulled off his jacket and hung it in the closet then returned to look Angie in the eye. "It's so the next time you see me walking you'll know I'm not going anywhere. Not unless I get this back from you."

_Oh great, a bike part to reassure me. Why can't you just tell_ _me you won't leave me? _"How do I know you don't have another one stashed somewhere?"

"Same way I knew all those 'suspicions' were bullshit."

_Okay then, was that so hard? _Angie sat down hard on the bed. "Jesus, Tyler, why didn't you _warn _me? Donovan told me he went to you first, but you let me get ambushed anyway."

What was that he was thinking about, standing back? She was demanding answers, not comfort. It was becoming clear that Angie had got a harder grip on things faster than he gave her credit for (and why was he feeling like he was one of those 'things'?). He sat next to her on the bed.

"If I told you you'd have sat up all night getting worked up, or run to Gooder or Maxwell and freaked out in advance." She was glaring angrily at the floor. "Look at me. _Look_ at me," he reached a hand out to grasp the back of her head and turn her toward him. "Who do you think knows better how this works, you or me? This is their party, and the only thing that matters is what _they_ believe. And if they didn't believe you, if you'd acted like somebody who doth protest way too much, it would have looked bad. Worse than bad. Gooder knew that, and he knew I'd keep my mouth shut or he wouldn't have told me any of it until this morning." Tyler considered what he'd just said. "I gotta hand it to them, they're starting to think like professionals."

Angie nodded. "Fine. Okay, so this is how it works. But what if they hadn't believed me, what then?" _What would __you__ have done?_

He let her go and started to stand up. "They did believe you. Case closed."

She grabbed his arm and repeated, "But what if they _hadn't_? What then?"

He pulled away. "I said, case _closed_. You lost your focus, you melted down but you pulled yourself together and did the smart thing on your own. You're learning."

"That's not an answer." Angie got up and went to the window again. Staring at the ocean was the only thing that could clear her head sometimes. _Clear my head…please, Ham, you're so good at that when you want to be._

"Everything I've been doing, all the shit I've been putting out and putting up with, and I _know_ other people are doing it too in other ways, everything that's happening fills my head with so much noise. I think I have it all sorted out then when I least expect it things start crowding each other and I think my head will explode." She almost looked back at him, almost. "Then you're back from whatever mayhem you're creating and everything kind of untangles in my brain. I don't know why, or how, it just does. I saw you walking away today and all that noise and confusion came rushing back in and all I could do was _scream_ because I thought I'd be left alone with it from now on." Now she did turn to look at him, and he was regarding her with that quiet chocolate gaze that always made her feel just a little bit too vulnerable.

"Oh, it's not what you think," Angie added hastily, "it's pure selfishness, because I'm learning to do it myself but it's so much easier not to have to. It's not your responsibility to keep my head quiet. I never had that before, not from anybody. I survived without it when you went to Mexico, I got stronger and braver and all that, and I _like_ that I did. And I could do it again. But I don't _want_ to."

_Goddammit, say what you mean, I didn't sign up for a tap dance marathon._ That thought came to both of them at once, though neither of them would say so.

"You don't _have_ to. I didn't go anywhere, and since you brought it up I'm just as goddamn selfish as you are. I told you what happened in Mexico. You're not the only one with noise in your head."

"But I can't take care of it with tequila. Tequila just makes me puke."

"Yeah, well, tequila just makes me wasted." Tyler stood so close to Angie that he had to look down at her. "Being with you makes me…"

"Crazy?" she asked, expecting to beat him to the smartass comment she was sure he'd come up with.

He shook his head and pressed closer to whisper against her hair as if he were sending a secret from his mouth to her mind.

"Human." He straightened again and raised her closed fist that still held the sparkplug. "And I'm not going anywhere." The "without you" was silent, like so many other things between them.

Uncertain how to respond, Angie fell back into her stream of consciousness instead, a stream that only Ham Tyler could follow (which frankly scared him).

"He was killing my friends, I was in _bed_ with him and he was helping to torture and kill them," Angie whispered in a shaky voice. "Okay so I didn't know, but how is that supposed to help? Maybe it should, but it doesn't. How could he _do_ that and never give me a clue?" She stared up at Tyler as if he really had an answer. He did, but it was the hardass logical variety.

"He's a murdering asshole, that's how. A murdering asshole who just like any regular asshole wanted a little something on the side for recreation, and it turned out to be you. But that's over."

_You make it sound so __simple_. "I wish it _was_ over, I wish I could _make_ it be over… and so much other stuff that isn't even close to being over." She stepped back and covered her face with her hands, shaking her head. "It's all just whirling around inside of me, you know? Even when it's quiet I can't get rid of it and it worries me because I can't afford to let it distract me. I just can't get _rid_ of it."

He stood watching her, thinking about what he'd seen as he went to the motor pool. She'd been screaming his name, but it was more than that and more than him. It was as if she were puking out something that was making her sick and scared. Tyler was seized by a sudden inspiration. When chaos threatened to bury him, the cold technical process of making things go bang killed some of the confusion in his head. Shooting guns blew away the fog. For Angie maybe screaming her guts out would do the trick. Just another way of making noise to drive off the evil spirits, or whatever that witchy guy in Angola had told him.

"How about we go down the beach, and you give the seagulls a little competition?"

Angie dropped her hands and stared. He was looking at her with that raised-eyebrow questioning expression. She _had_ felt that poisonous fog inside of her clear a little when she tore loose with that unholy wail.

"You never disappoint me, Tyler. But sometimes you surprise the _hell_ out of me."

* * *

On the beach about half a mile from the lighthouse steps, well out of sight of the other rebels, Angie stood knee-deep in the surf shrieking at the top of her lungs. It wasn't some thin little sissy squeal, Tyler noted, it was a gut-deep continuous roaring howl of fury. Every obscenity, every foul name that came to her head, every expression of rage and shame to address everything that had happened since Boston, a response to every disgusting thing she'd had to do and had just discovered she'd done without knowing. Tyler sat on the rocks about thirty feet away, giving her the space he figured she deserved. It looked and sounded almost like an exorcism, and he supposed in a way it was. After a long time, when her voice was worn hoarse and she'd gone to her knees in the water like she'd done in the compound, he figured it was finished. He slogged out to where she knelt, soaked to the bone and gasping for breath.

"Had enough?"

She nodded, coughing a little. Tyler would have carried her back to the rocks but she wouldn't let him, walking ahead of him to the place where he'd been sitting. She was flushed and breathless as he peered into her eyes.

Suddenly Angie burst into tears, surprising them both. "I lost the sparkplug," she whimpered.

Tyler couldn't help but laugh, albeit gently, as he put his arms around her, "That's okay, Angel, I got plenty more." She jerked back and stared at him, eyes still streaming (which had less to do with a fucking bike part than it did with everything else, he knew) and he explained, "I was just making a point, okay? I'll give you the key to the parts box if it'll make you feel better." She shook her head no.

"I'd probably lose it." She reached around his neck and started crying again.

Tyler hugged her and rubbed her back, saying nothing. No words, just clearing away the remaining layers of chaos that had buried her. In a very few minutes Angie gulped in a deep breath and pulled away to stand in front of him.

"Thanks." For coming up with what would help when she had no ideas of her own.

He brushed some wet hair from her face. "Don't thank me, I'm not doing you any favors."

She nodded and smirked, "Right," then stretched up to kiss him. "You said being with me makes you feel human. Well being with you makes me feel… clean."

He regarded her with a half-smile, "Angie… after all the shit that's happened," He was close to the edge of something he hadn't visited for a very, very long time; it was was happening lately with increasing frequency. It was harder each time to keep a safe distance from that place he was convinced neither one of them could afford to go. At the moment he was still able to recover his balance. "Remind me _never_ to piss you off."

Angie leaned into him a little, hands pressed to his chest. "Neither one of us is very good at this are we." No question mark, no need to explain. She felt a chuckle in his chest as he drew in a breath and blew it out again, his gaze shifting to somewhere over her shoulder before he steered her to one side and led the way back in the direction of the lighthouse steps.

"We do okay," he answered and started walking away. He stopped when Angie dragged back on his arm.

"_Tyler,_" she began, ready to go for broke and give them both whatever last shove it would take, but he shushed her with a thumb against her lips, then replaced the thumb with a kiss he hoped would seal her silence. When he pulled back he could see even her silence was demanding a response.

"Me too," he told her. _Is that enough? I don't know if I have more. _"Now c'mon and get into some dry clothes or you'll die of pneumonia and all this psycho soap opera will have been for nothing."

They walked back to the compound side by side. When they reached the top of the stairs Angie saw Willie beckoning her in the distance.

"He probably has some ideas for the next move," Angie mused. "After I dry off I need to get together with him and see what we can come up with for that meeting tomorrow."

"I'm gonna catch up with Chris and do the same," Tyler agreed. "'I dunno' definitely isn't gonna be an option."

Angie waved to Willie, "In a minute!" then turned for a final look at Tyler before they strode off in opposite directions to see to their respective details of war.

"We're good," she said. No question mark.

"Always." No explanation.

Something settled into place between them even as they walked away.

_It is what it is._


	14. Words and wisdom

Ham Tyler had always been the jump up and go kind. Awake before the sun, cleaned up – presuming water was available where he'd slept or passed out –and into the day before the "day" had begun. Okay, so things had changed a little recently. Now he was still awake before the sun, but up a little more carefully to avoid waking the _very _dedicated sleeper who shared his bed. He ended the ritual now by letting Angie know that _some_ people, including him, were up and going about their business, whereas before it had been simply run for what came next. Lately when he tapped her head for the customary wake-up-see-ya-lazyass he reminded himself that if they ever got out of this alive, and she could stand him without a war going on, that he'd get them a bed so big there was no way she could spread out and claim the whole thing the minute that sixth sense she had for available space triggered the Swastika Maneuver.

This morning, though, something was different. The sun wasn't up yet, true, but the spring hinge that normally shot him into the day seemed to have the safety on. Maybe it was the who-the-hell-knew-what that had fallen into place on the beach yesterday after Angie's scream-fest. Maybe it was his intuition that what would get started today at the meeting could be a major turning point in their little corner of the Resistance, driven by the major turning point announced by the lizards in their quest to turn kids into traitors. Whatever it was, it had him lying there in no immediate hurry to do anything else _but_ lie there, listening to Angie's quiet snoring and enjoying the warmth of her as she lay curled up with her back pressed against his side.

_Christ, woman, you have ruined me._

The longer he lay there (only a minute or two, actually) the more he wanted to do nothing else. _Well maybe not __nothing__ else, _he thought as he reached for her. Quickies weren't his thing, but the bundle of warmth in his arms was a little too inviting to resist. No need for a quickie, though… it was hours until the preliminary meeting that would be followed by a camp-wide gathering to discuss the next move. Not for the first time he understood being an early riser definitely had its advantages.

Being nudged awake by a string of furry kisses up her spine was a little confusing to Angie. She was swimming in that thick velvety fog of semi-sleep, and this was sort of coaxing her to the surface instead of yanking her up brain-first like the typical Tyler wakey-wakey. She was stretching just a little and murmuring a few wake up noises as the final furry kiss settled under her right ear.

"Mmm…" she slurred, "laterlayzeeasssss?"

Tyler answered first with an involuntary groan. The way she rolled against him, skin skimming skin, sent a straight shot to his groin. "How about now instead of later," he breathed huskily against her cheek. Her drowsy kiss missed his mouth by a mile. Without opening her eyes Angie smiled a little vaguely, pressed her face into his neck... and promptly slumped back into sleep. Tyler knew waking her would not be easy no matter how pleasurable the reason, and he wasn't depraved enough to attempt intercourse with a sleeping woman. Not lately, anyway.

"On the other hand…" his dark side suggested, conversing with his blue balls, "once you get started she might wake up and enjoy it…"

_You're a sick man, Tyler._ In spite of some discomfort he smiled as he carefully disengaged from her and muttered against her bed-head, "S'okay, Angel, I still love you."

The words came naturally and unbidden. He considered them, and their context, for only a few seconds. He'd spoken the same words to his wife for the first time when she, too, had been sound asleep. Less pressure, maybe, when there was no danger of a response. Somehow she'd known anyway, and he was certain that Angie would know it as well. In certain matters words were redundant.

Tyler mentally prepared himself for a very cold shower and opted for a carefully arranged robe instead of a towel. He hoped that he wasn't exuding some sort of pheromone that would alert Ruthie. He was convinced she could pinpoint a man with a hard-on at a hundred yards, and he wasn't in the mood to be polite.

* * *

"You're quiet this morning. You're not still bothered by them asking all those questions? They have to watch out for everything, we all do," Maggie was doing most of the talking as she and Angie sat with their morning coffee, still an hour to go before the nine o'clock preliminary meeting. It had been relocated from the kitchen to the mess hall proper, having been widened to include everyone for the followup. The followup gathering had been planned partly because the decisions made among the currently operating teams – coordinating, tactical, and intelligence – would involve everyone on some level, and also to avoid the endless game of compound "telephone" that could lead to so much misinformation and misunderstanding.

"No Mag, I'm over that. I guess I'm just wondering what comes next… in a way it looks like a good thing that David showed up out of nowhere, and at the same time as Daniel told you about the Youth plans. You seem to have lucked out that he is a really loose talker. I mean, if you had to find an upside to dealing with that asshole, this would be it. And since David has a history of gathering the unsuspecting… well you know. I feel like a slacker in a sisters-in-slime kind of way, since I've been doing nothing but the Visitor sanctioned crap and not the other."

The "other" meaning Angie hadn't seen Todd in nearly a week. The novelty of the sex seemed to have worn off, and his involvement in the new direction in the Youth movement and its impending unveiling had him fully engaged. He'd sent a message to her in Biophysics… "I'll call you"… that sounded so lamely human-male she'd laughed out loud when she read it, to the curiosity of her Visitor coworkers. "He's just experimenting with Earth humor," she'd told them. They assumed Todd's ongoing connection with this Earth female was a function of ambition, and believed that he was getting inside information about the Resistance that would advance his career. The reality wasn't too far off, but his education in the finer aspects of Earth behavior had been pretty limited by Angie's reliance on the cliché and stereotype of American culture, which she could tell it had satisfied him. As for the sex, that had obviously been research as well. In fact once she'd shown up bruised and beaten from the "dissolution" of her fictionally ended relationship Todd's sex drive dropped precipitously. To Angie it didn't seem very much different from the average lowlife human male response… once a woman appeared committed it was time to run for the exit. She was grateful, though, that he hadn't proposed a traditional end to their "arrangement". She probably wouldn't survive it.

"So? What's going on? It's too late to play the mysterious stranger."

Maggie and Angie's strategic partnership had grown far beyond its beginnings as infiltrators. The intimate nature of the infiltration, and the personal trauma it cost them both, had forged an alliance more like sisters than friends or comrades. There was little that either missed when observing the other.

Maggie refilled their mugs and sat down again at the table. "We're _all_ wondering what's coming next. That's not what I meant." She looked Angie hard in the eye. "Don't bullshit me, girl. We go through too much together on an almost-daily basis for you to start dropping a privacy curtain now. Something wrong with Soldier of Fortune? You remember what I said." That she didn't care how badass he was; she'd blow his balls off if he ever did Angie wrong. Angie had no doubt that she'd do just that, even if she died trying.

"Oh, right." Angie's brow furrowed as she tried to figure out something to say that might make sense. "Well, I think Tyler told me he loved me this morning."

"You _think_ he told you… was he speaking another language?"

Rapidly shaking her head Angie clarified, "No, I mean I was mostly asleep. I mean maybe I was dreaming… though I gotta say I've never dreamed about _that_ before."

"Honey you're saying 'love' like it's a bad thing. You're not sure if you wanted to hear it? After all the shit you've been through, and let me tell you I can see from miles away there's something connecting you two, you're not sure how you feel about him?"

"Shit, Maggie, that's just it." Angie shook her head in consternation and shot a look around the room as if hunting for logic, "The _words_, they're what's messing me up. We are who we are and we do what we do and yeah, I'm completely sure how I feel about it as long as I don't have to think too hard about giving it a name. I _do_ want him around; I _do _want to be with him. I do know I can trust him with my life and everything else about me he hasn't even figured out yet… which isn't much, believe me. And I know he's the one person that always, _always_ makes perfect sense to me. Because he just is who he is, no excuses, no apologies, and he's very good at not letting that hurt anyone but himself." She expected to see a cocked eyebrow of disbelief, but Maggie just nodded.

"Yeah, well I've noticed that last part myself. Not just where you're concerned. I guessed early on Tyler keeps himself to himself for more reasons than self-defense, but I only guessed it after Ruby mentioned it more than once."

This triggered a sad smile. "Yeah, Ruby got it right away. Long before Tyler or I did, really. But to answer your question, yeah I am sure about how I feel. I feel certain, and that's a real rare occurrence in the New World."

"So you love him. What's the problem with him saying it out loud." No question mark.

"Shit, words again!" Angie pounded down her coffee. "What does that mean, even now? And even before… my dad said he loved me after every time he beat the crap out of me. David said he loved me, even though we both knew it was a lie, even before I knew how _big_ a lie all of that was with him." Maggie opened her mouth to respond, but Angie cut her off. "Before you tell me that makes me like Tyler because he doesn't believe in it either, just shut up. All it means is that I've learned the weakness of words." She smiled again, but not sadly. "If words held so much weight, poor Willie would be _screwed_. But we've learned to 'speak Willie' even when we don't correct him, by knowing him. So the short answer," here Maggie bugged her eyes out, "okay, the _long_ answer is that I know that what's going on with Tyler and me, the way he treats me and trusts me and listens to me and encourages me," she took a breath, "and so on and vice versa, all of that counts as love in any phrasebook. But the _word_, that so-conventional way of expressing things, just got me wondering… what's next? What happens when this war is over, presuming we're both still alive and can stand the sight of each other once we're not just each other's only refuge? How do you make a life together based on what we've been through? War, and desperation, and this fucked up New World, and everything I never knew before I got here?"

It was Maggie's turn to smile, sadly. "You know I told you Mark proposed to me just before he got killed?" Angie nodded solemnly. "Well maybe it's because I had less time to think about it, but none of what you just said even crossed my mind. All I thought was 'together', we'd be together. War, no war, Old World, New World, all of that was just bullshit. Probably _because_ of how we'd met and what we'd been through, it made things even clearer. 'Together' was where it was going to start for us, and the rest would happen however it happened." Maggie teared up, surprising herself. "Look at me, getting sloppy after so long."

"Not so very long, Mag," Angie reached out and grasped her hand. "I wish I'd met him. He must have been something, what you said about him handling what you had to get into with Daniel."

"That wasn't really his finest hour," Maggie admitted, "but he managed to figure it out when it mattered. And to be honest, I don't think you'd have been the best of friends." Suddenly she clamped down hard on Angie's hand. "And I'm telling you now, Angela Harper, no matter what you do or don't want to call it, do _not_ let bullshit like war and new and old and 'what's next' get in the way of what you've got if it's what you want and it feels right. I don't care if Tyler's a mercenary or a saint or a fucking ditch digger. If he treats you right, and you trust him, and you feel right together, do _not_ fuck yourself up just because you have too much time to think about it. Promise?"

By now both women were a little teary.

"Promise," Angie said. "Though I hope you'll forgive me if I don't rush to the altar with him… some conventions I've _never_ had much of a taste for."

"Careful," Maggie warned with a smile, "ol' Soldier of Fortune is _surprisingly_ traditional in some ways." Angie had told her about Tyler's firm belief that a bed was the only appropriate place for sex.

"I'm working on it, trust me."


	15. Long days to come

"So Angie and I have another 'date' with Daniel and Todd. Only this time we'll pretend to have an argument over where to go out, Angie and me, and will end up going to two different bars, or whatever. Then we can probably get at least the date of the announcement event."

Maggie had already told the others at this early meeting that this "announcement" would be different, in that it would be held in the library, and attended only by invited members of the Visitor Youth Program and the friends they'd recruited, along with family members. It would be recorded, then edited and broadcast via the Visitor networks. The Visitors had long ago stopped their live telecasts in the interest of discouraging rebel raids and ensuring absolute control of the what the public would see.

"The only place they can put on something like that is in the special events reception hall," Angie added. "There's a huge multi-use room just outside the auditorium lobby. Tailor-made for their scam events."

"Sounds like our cue," Tyler nodded at Chris. "If Gooder's lizard buddy comes through, we're gonna have enough uniforms and weapons to pass for a lizard battalion."

Willie gave Angie an eager look, and she shot back to Tyler, "Not so fast, Quick-Draw, we've got some news that will turn this into more than another blast-and-flatten festival."

Tyler's eyebrows rose and he nodded formally to Angie. "Ladies first." She smirked at him and continued.

"Even if I haven't unlocked the biological key to beating the Visitors, my time on the inside hasn't been totally devoted to sex and violence." Everyone saw Tyler blink at that last word… the closest he'd ever come to flinching in front of the others.

Angie went blithely on. "Any of you guys who've used a PC, you know that the files go into a directory, that you just pick the little picture of the file folder where you work belongs and save it there." She beamed at Willie, who beamed back at her. "Well, the Visitors have done us a big favor. They adapted their systems to integrate with earth PC directories and networks. Except when you see a little file folder on their directory, it is a whole server's worth of data, containing its own executable software."

Tyler was glazing over, Farber not far behind, and Donovan and Maggie struggling to keep up. Robert and Julie were right on top of it.

"You mean that their directory folders are like jump drives? Modular, complete, and ready to be plugged in anywhere?" Julie asked, obviously excited by the prospect.

"That's right." Angie looked at the non-chip heads and explained, "And for you real-world people, it means that there is a real, solid box to unplug and take with us. And it will plug into our little renegade computers here, and bring along everything we need to use what's contained on the modules, _and_ will tell our computers how to use it."

Chris grinned. "Looks like we're gonna be killing a few big birds with one stone."

"And I think maybe we don't have to ask if Angie knows where the biophysics module lives," Donovan suggested with an even wider smile.

"Nope. I got shown that my first day on the job. And by now I'm so much a functionary that even with my just slightly raised security clearance I have access to that little bit of salvation every day. No big deal to them anyway, since the Visitors consider content and not architecture to be the target of the Resistance. Of course we can pick up both at once..."

"Two pronged approach," Tyler proposed, no question mark. "Bust up the dog and pony show and blow up the recording and transmission equipment so there's nothing to transmit over the Bullshit Network, _and_ yank out the biophysics module so the Geek Squad can get what they need." The name Geek Squad had been used with a tone of respect by everyone for some time now.

"Works for me," Donovan concurred. "How about the rest of you?"

Robert had been silent until now, and he directed his inquiry to Angie.

"Do you think it might be worthwhile to capture David Peterson, to find out more about the Visitor's plans?"

"He could be useful," Julie agreed, "from what Angie said he's been in with the Visitors for quite a while. We might find a way to convince him to cooperate." She noticed Tyler's vulpine smile. "I said _convince _not torture!" Tyler held both hands up in supplication, the picture of wide-eyed innocence.

At that point, everyone present looked at Angie. When she spoke, her voice was harder than Tyler's on his worst day.

"He's good for nothing but mulch." Reading the surprise on the faces of Donovan, Julie, and Maxwell, she added, "You guys do what you think best. But if I find him first… no promises."

By the end of the meeting a basic operational strategy had been agreed upon. There would be three teams. One, led by Tyler and Donovan, would knock out the broadcasting and recording equipment, and get out as many kids and family members as would go. The other team, led by Julie and Robert, would go to the biophysics area where Angie would help them locate and pull out the server module. Based on Angie's two clearance passes, she and Willie would reproduce as many passes as were needed by the team members to allow them quick access to anyplace they needed to go. Caleb and Elias would monitor the escape routes and exits and keep in contact with the teams and with Chris Farber, who would be driving the lead vehicle of the few that would be transporting the rebels. Donovan would contact Martin once they had the date and time, to get access to a Visitor personnel carrier.

"So until we get more information, this is it so far." Julie was recapping. "Our vehicles will wait in the rear of the building. We'll use Angie's passes to get in the two entrances closest to the target areas, leaving Caleb and Elias at each entry point where they can pass as security staff and monitor our progress. Angie, we're going to need details of where the broadcast center will be, and Maggie find out what you can about how and where the children and their families will be transported to the library… and to the mother ship. And if either of you can get information on what the plan is for the people who decide not to join up, or anything else not on the public agenda, that would be a big help."

Maggie sighed and nodded. "I was hoping to avoid another 'romantic evening' with Daniel."

Julie instructed, "You do the least you have to do to find out what you can, just take what you can get. You too, Angie."

Angie shrugged. "I'm not worried about a 'romantic' evening. I got lucky… Todd's pretty much lost interest in the sex part. I think I was a little too 'delicate' for his entertainment." She squirmed a little, feeling the traces of most recent punctures drag against her shirt. "Not soon enough for me though." She looked straight at Maggie. "We'll figure out a less intimate way for you to play Daniel for that stuff." The others shifted uncomfortably. Of course they knew what these two had been doing to get the information and access they were now discussing, but nobody wanted to consider the details. Only Tyler remained entirely impassive.

"So aside from those details, all we need now is the date and time," Donovan interjected to break the uneasiness.

"Well I can tell you they still haven't completed the planning, but it's going to be either next weekend or the one after, right Maggie?" Angie looked to her colleague.

"Far as I can tell, that's right. Daniel keeps telling me he wants to try to get me a guest pass, but I told him I don't like big parties." She paused and smiled wickedly, "Of course I don't mind breaking them up."

"Besides," Angie added slyly, "you've already got a backstage pass with more clearance than his! As for me, well Todd has hinted that whenever it happens I'll be called in to work some overtime. At least one employee from each division will be on hand to keep an eye on things, because there'll be so many outsiders around. They want us for extra security. Of course I'll act all crushed that I can't attend the big soiree, but resigned to doing my duty for the good of the Visitor cause." She stuck a finger in her mouth and mimed gagging.

Having been silent for a long time, Tyler suddenly laughed out loud and made everyone jump. "Getting paid time and a half _and_ indulging your taste for irony. Not bad."

"Just make sure you don't tell them where to send your final paycheck," drawled Caleb, and _everyone_ laughed. Just then Julie noticed that Willie, who had not spoken a word throughout the meeting, was looking downcast.

"What's the matter, Willie? Do you think we've left something out? If there's anything you think we need to reconsider, speak up. You're part of this team too."

All eyes on him, Willie asked, "But if I am a part of this team, why I am I not to be included in this important aid?" His expression was so somber that nobody corrected his English. "I have taken part in others. Am I not trusted for this one because I am one of 'them'?"

Angie cast a look around the group and gratefully noticed that (almost) everyone was as taken aback as herself. "Jesus, Willie, how can you think that? We couldn't be planning this at all if it weren't for you, I'd just be another unemployed library geek if you hadn't worked with me and taught me so much!"

Then Tyler spoke up, to everyone's surprise, "Right now we're all on the biggest Wanted Poster in history, but Willie you are Public Enemy Number One. You'd be a bigger trophy to Diana than Donovan, or Parrish, or any of us because you know more about what we can do to them than anyone else." As if trying to protect his dark reputation he added with a smirk toward Angie, "Besides, if we lose you we lose the only one who can teach Miss Get Out of My Face a damn thing worth knowing, since she'll never learn to _shoot _worth shit."

Willie nodded and smiled a little doubtfully, then Julie explained "I think what Tyler means is the danger to you would be too much to risk. We need you here, Willie, doing what you've been doing, and helping with the smaller operations that won't put you in front of too many key Visitors." She looked hard at Tyler, who nodded grudgingly in agreement.

"Close enough," he said.

"Okay," Donovan announced as he headed to open the doors to the mess hall, "time to open the doors and address the masses."

The camp-wide meeting lasted barely a half hour, and raised only a few objections that were quickly defused by clearer explanations. The major one being that if the raid was a success and the biophysics module was successfully taken, how would that affect things at the base?

Robert addressed the question. "Once we have the module, which Angie and Willie assure us contains its own bridge and executable softwares, we will learn exactly what the Visitors are protecting themselves against in our atmosphere, and what they might not be able to protect against. Then we get to work manufacturing what will do them in."

"And an antidote for the Visitors who have helped the Rebellion," Julie added hastily with a quick nod to Willie. "Whether or not you know about them, there have been hundreds who have risked their own lives to help us and the worldwide network."

Updates were promised over the next few days, and the meeting broke up. Many of the rebels had little to do at present, other than continue their various trainings and keep up with the day-to-day necessities of obtaining food, medical and other supplies under Elias' guidance.

* * *

"So what was that crack about 'sex and violence', anyway?" Maggie ran to catch up with Angie. They were meeting that night with Todd and Daniel to play out their sham disagreement over dinner plans, but she didn't want to leave the question until later.

Angie was puzzled. "What? Oh, you know. Just a joke."

"I didn't see Tyler laughing." When Angie didn't answer, Maggie grabbed her arm and dragged her to the cliff walk to sit down. "Why are you trying to act like it's all no big deal?"

"Like _what's_ no big deal? Fucking the enemy and learning to kill, all with a smile?"

"Nobody's smiling about it, Angie. And don't bullshit me, that 'violence' crap had nothing to do with learning to kill. You're trying to build some distance, just in case."

"Huh?"

Maggie reached out and grabbed Angie on either side of her head, and shook. "Thinking. Too. Much. If you act like it doesn't matter, it won't matter as much, right? Every reason you're with Ham Tyler, everything that makes you want to be there and not want to lose what you've got, that's all just swell as long as nobody mentions it out loud. Go figure, he spoke first. Shocked the hell outta me too, I admit. But why can't you just be glad you have one less uncertainty to deal with?"

Angie sighed and shook her head. "I don't know, okay? I'm not used to this, this… _needing__._ And having someone need from me, like that." She gestured in frustration. "We went all through this earlier, didn't we? A few stupid words get all my wheels turning."

"Not so stupid." Suddenly Maggie seized on the obvious. "Maybe this is the dumbest question in the world, but have you talked to _him_ about it?" When Angie shook her head, Maggie added, "Well duh, maybe it's time. You can't possibly want The Fixer to stay one up on you in the emotional communication department, do you?" She gave Angie a shove. "Well _do_ you? A hardened mercenary more in touch with his feelings than an elite intellectual like yourself? How embarrassing."

"_All right_, all right!" Angie shook Maggie off. "Je-SUS, what is it with you and your unassailable logic?"

Maggie's smile turned a little wistful. "I was corrupted by Ruby, I guess. She was a firm believer in finding the light in the darkest situation and keeping it going no matter what."

Angie first nodded in agreement, and then her eyes widened in faux horror. "Ah, shit, you're saying Ham Tyler is my 'light'…" she raised her face to the sky and moaned, "I'm fucking _doomed._"

Maggie laughed as she hauled Angie to her feet. "You could do worse."

"You got that right… it could be _Donovan_!" She shuddered from head to foot. "I think I'd be suffocated by all that _goodness_."

"Like your man said," Maggie winked, "you're _wild_ for them bad boys."

* * *

Something woke him up, but he wasn't sure what. Like the old days, Tyler lay still and "felt" his surroundings. He could hear her breathing a distance away; when he sat up he could see she was sitting in the chair by the window, arms wrapped around herself, staring out into the darkness.

"Angie?" he called to her. No answer. "What's going on?"

She looked back and faked an awkward smile. "Nothing. It's okay, go back to sleep. It's been a long day, and we have longer ones coming. I'm fine."

"Bullshit." He got up and went to lean against the table, looking down at her. "You have one of those dreams again?" Odd that her tossing and whimpering hadn't wakened him. When she kept looking insistently out the window he tapped her shoulder. "If you keep sitting up all night being 'fine' you're gonna get somebody killed during one of these long days. I know you know how to quiet down that busy head of yours, I'm the one who taught you. So maybe you'd better tell me what's keeping it busy."

"I'm sorry about that shit I said about sex and violence today. I don't know why I was so nasty."

He wasn't fooled. "Apology accepted. But you know that _I_ know that's not it."

She didn't turn from the window yet, but she knew it was time to talk, like Maggie said. "What you said this morning… it scared me a little."

"I said a lot of things this morning. Gimme a hint."

Now she turned and looked up at him. _Here goes…_ "How about that first one."

Tyler nodded in recognition. "How about it?" He waited.

"Well I know you haven't said it in a long, long time."

He huffed a tolerant sigh and pulled over a chair from the other side of the table, then sat facing her. "I haven't _thought_ about it for a long, long time. Is that a problem?" When she didn't answer right away he observed, "Must be, since it scared you." No question mark.

She looked out the window again.

"If you keep staring out that window I'm gonna get my ass back in bed and forget the whole thing. It's _late_, and as you pointed out we have long days ahead. Right now sleep is a priority, so speak now or get a grip until further notice."

Practical, hardass, and straight to the bone.

"I just can't help wondering when things will change again." Before he could blurt out more exasperation she continued, "When you might change your mind, I mean. Everybody else did, or at least it seemed that way. Not that I think it was me, but still… Or else they died, of course. I think it's just the _words_ that made me wonder, not the fact, because the words usually turned out to be a lie, one way or another. I'm not saying you're _gonna_ change your mind, or that you're lying, but what if… what if when things get back to normal, if they ever do... what if we just can't deal with it?"

Tyler's eyes widened. Shit, that whacked-out stream of consciousness of hers was rolling again, and in his present state of sleepus interruptus it was a chore to keep up.

"Angel, stop." When she tried to go on he reached out and took her chin in one hand, thumb pressed against her lips. "_Stop_. Your mouth's outrunning your brain." He shook his head and added in a perplexed voice, "It's outrunning _mine_, anyway."

Angie pulled her head back. "Yeah, okay. You asked, so I tried to answer. Maybe no questions is a good idea after all, I don't want you thinking I'm crazy."

"Crazy?" He rolled his eyes and laughed. "I knew you were crazy from day one. If that mattered I'd have left you on the road." He looked at her for a minute. There she was, still trying to make sense of everything. "You're all worked up over a few words. Hell we both agreed early on that words don't matter all that much. They just put a label on what you already know."

"Except when they're lies."

Tyler's expression narrowed reflexively like it had at the meeting, but only for a second. Time to cut to the chase, or this angst crap could go on forever.

"Well they're not." He jerked his head in the direction of the door. "If you really think they are, don't let it hit you in the ass." Angie blinked once and said nothing, but looked a little ashamed. "All right then," Tyler went on, "stop _wondering_ so much, will you? Jesus, I never knew anyone who worked over 'what if' the way you do… like a puppy dog with a chew toy. Okay, here it is, no 'what ifs'… this morning I woke up horny and you didn't wake up much at all. So I said 'that's okay I still love you' and went for a cold shower." He paused and shook his head in consternation. "And that makes you sit up worrying and jump head first into 'I wonder' and 'what if' and getting all worried about predicting the future… I dunno, maybe I've been reading this all wrong. Like I said that first night in L.A., maybe we should go back to plan A… maybe it would be better for both of us." _Yeah, like I believe that for a second._ He got up and went to sit on the end of the bed.

"It's too late for plan A," Angie admitted simply. Tyler nodded in agreement and extended his hand.

"C'mere." When she got close enough he slid back and pulled her down backwards to sit in front of him, then wrapped his arms around her waist. He laid his cheek alongside hers and spoke quietly.

"Now listen to me, because I'm not gonna say it again but it needs saying now." Tyler took a breath and pulled Angie a little closer against him. "I'm almost forty-four years old, and I spent almost half that time blowing things up and knocking things down and killing people, and getting better at it than I am at anything else. The last woman who reminded me that there were reasons not to be on my own has been gone a long time, and they were the same reasons I have now. For the first time in almost twenty years there are reasons to be with someone and it feels right, and quiet, and everything else that my fucking life has not been. It's not about words, but this morning I said 'em anyway. Call it a flashback if you want." He was silent for a minute or two, then added in a near-whisper next to her ear, "It is what it is, Angel. Call it Plan B, call it Plan 9 From Outer Space, call it whatever you want. We're good... _good._ You're the library lady, look it up in the dictionary. And I can't see how the end of this fucking war is gonna change that."

"You willing to remind me of that, you know, when I forget?"

He heaved a mock sigh. "If I have to."

Angie relaxed against him. "Thanks, Dr. Fixer. Don't say it, you're 'not doing me any favors'. But you're real good at talking me down off all these ledges I manage to crawl out on." She felt his smile against her face.

"Lady, you could find a ledge on the Bonneville Salt Flats. So... any questions? This is a one-time-only offer, by the way, so think fast."

"Do you think you'll ever have a problem with me being crazy?"

"I've learned to live with it." Tyler tightened his arms and gave Angie a rough shake, then pulled her under the covers and flopped melodramatically onto his back. "Now for christsake, can I go to sleep?"

Angie crawled on top of him and ran her mouth over his face and neck while her hands ran... elsewhere.

"Mmm," she purred, "maybe you could take up where you left off this morning?"

Instead of responding in kind, Tyler gripped her shoulders and rolled her to the side.

"Are you kidding? It has been a long goddamn day and I have fifty hand blasters and three dozen disruptor rifles to go over first thing in the morning… which is coming up _fast _thanks to you." When Angie frowned in disappointment he offered a hard smirk, "Looks like it's _your_ turn for a cold shower."

Her frown morphed into a sly smile. "S'okay, Tyler, I still love you."

"Well don't expect me to sit up all night _wondering_ about it."

"Uh-uh."

Rolling onto his side and dropping an arm over her he added in a fading mumble, "Good… one nutjob in this room is enough."


End file.
